elixir of immortality to furnish out for himself | hour; but it is ever the peculiar power of Mr. a dainty solitude, where he may dwell, soothed Godwin to make us feel that there is something with the music of his own undying thoughts, within us which cannot perish! and rejoicing in his severance from his frail and transitory fellows. Apart from those among whom he moves, his yearnings for sympathy become more intense as it eludes him, and his perceptions of the mortal lot of his species become more vivid and more fond, as he looks on it from an intellectual eminence which is alike unassailable to death and to joy. Even in this work, where the author has to conduct a perpetual miracle, his exceeding earnestness makes it difficult to believe him a fabulist. Listen to his hero, as he expatiates in the first consciousness of his high prerogatives:

"Fleetwood" has less of our author's characteristic energy than any other of his works. The earlier parts of it, indeed, where the formation of the hero's character, in free rovings amidst the wildest of nature's scenery, is traced, have a deep beauty which reminds us of some of the holiest imaginations of Wordsworth. But when the author would follow him into the world-through the frolics of college, the dissipations of Paris, and the petty disquietudes of matrimonial life-we feel that he has condescended too far. He is no graceful trifler; he cannot work in these frail and low materials. There is, however, one scene in this novel most wild and fearful. This is where Fleetwood, who has long brooded in anguish over the idea of his wife's falsehood, keeps strange festival on his wedding-daywhen, having procured a waxen image of her whom he believes perfidious, and dressed a frightful figure in a uniform to represent her imagined paramour, he locks himself in an apartment with these horrid counterfeits, a supper of cold meats, and a barrel-organ, on which he plays the tunes often heard from the pair he believes guilty, till his silent agony gives place to delirium, he gazes around with glassy eyes, sees strange sights and dallies with frightful mockeries, and at last tears the dreadful spectacle to atoms, and is seized with furious madness. We do not remember, even in the works of our old dramatists, any thing of its kind comparable to this voluptuous fantasy of despair.

"I surveyed my limbs, all the joints and articulations of my frame, with curiosity and astonishment. What! exclaimed I, these limbs, this complicated but brittle frame shall last for ever! No disease shall attack it; no pain shall seize it; death shall withhold from it for ever his abhorred grasp! Perpetual vigour, perpetual activity, perpetual youth, shall take up their abode with me! Time shall generate in me no decay, shall not add a wrinkle to my brow, or convert a hair of my head to gray! This body was formed to die; this edifice to crumble into dust; the principles of corruption and mortality are mixed up in every atom of my frame. But for me the laws of nature are suspended, the eternal wheels of the universe roll backward; I am destined to be triumphant over Fate and Time! Months, years, cycles, centuries! To me these are but as indivisible moments. I shall never become old; I shall always be, as it were, in the porch "Mandeville" has all the power of its auand infancy of existence; no lapse of years thor's earliest writings; but its main subjectshall subtract any thing from my future dura- the development of an engrossing and maddention. I was born under Louis the Twelfth;ing hatred-is not one which can excite the life of Francis the First now threatens a human sympathy. There is, however, a bright speedy termination; he will be gathered to his relief to the gloom of the picture, in the angelic fathers, and Henry, his son, will succeed him. disposition of Clifford, and the sparkling loveBut what are princes, and kings, and genera-liness of Henrietta, who appears "full of life, tions of men to me! I shall become familiar with the rise and fall of empires; in a little while the very name of France, my country, will perish from off the face of the earth, and men will dispute about the situation of Paris, as they dispute about the site of ancient Nineveh, and Babylon, and Troy. Yet I shall still be young. I shall take my most distant posterity by the hand; I shall accompany them in their career; and, when they are worn out and exhausted, shall shut up the tomb over them, and set forward."

This is a strange tale, but it tells like a true one! When we first read it, it seemed as though it had itself the power of alchemy to steal into our veins, and render us capable of resisting death and age. For a short-too short! a space, all time seemed open to our personal view-we felt no longer as of yes terday; but the grandest parts of our knowledge of the past seemed mightiest recollections of a far-off childhood.

and splendour, and joy." All Mr. Godwin's female heroines have a certain airiness and radiance-a visionary grace, peculiar to them, which may at first surprise by their contrast to the robustness of his masculine creations. But it will perhaps be found that the more deeply man is conversant with the energies of his own heart, the more will he seek for opposite qualities in woman.

His

Of all Mr. Godwin's writings the choicest in point of style is a little essay "on Sepulchres." Here his philosophic thought, subdued and sweetened by the contemplation of mortality, is breathed forth in the gentlest tone. "Political Justice," with all the extravagance of its first edition, or with all the inconsistencies of its last, is a noble work, replete with lofty principle and thought, and often leading to the most striking results by a process of the severest reasoning. Man, indeed, cannot and ought not to act universally on its leading doctrine that we should in all things seek only the greatest amount of good without favour or affection; but it is at least better than the low selfishness of the world. It breathes also a This was the happy extravagance of an mild and cheerful faith in the progressive ad

"The wars we too remembered of King Nine, And old Assaracus, and Ibycus divine."

vances and the final perfection of the species. | ness his success. To our minds, indeed, he

sufficiently proves the falsehood of his adversary's doctrines by his own intellectual character. His works are, in themselves, evidences that there is power and energy in man which have never yet been fully brought into action,

It was this good hope for humanity which excited Mr. Malthus to affirm, that there is in the constitution of man's nature a perpetual barrier to any extensive improvement in his earthly condition. After a long interval, Mr. Godwin has announced a reply to this popular system—and which were not given to the species in a system which reduces man to an animal, governed by blind instinct, and destitute of reason, sentiment, imagination, and hope, whose most mysterious instincts are matter of calculation to be estimated by rules of geometrical series! Most earnestly do we desire to wit

vain. He has lived himself in the soft and mild light of those peaceful years, which he believes shall hereafter bless the world, when force and selfishness shall disappear, and love and joy shall be the unerring lights of the species.

MATURIN.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

their hold until the golden chords of our sensibility and imagination themselves are broken. They pass by us sometimes like gorgeous phantoms, sometimes like "horrible shadows and unreal mockeries," which seem to elude us because they are not of us. When we follow him closest, he introduces us into a region where all is unsatisfactory and unreal-the chaos of principles, fancies, and passionswhere mightiest elements are yet floating without order, where appearances between substance and shadow perpetually harass us, where visionary forms beckon us through painful avenues, and, on approach, sink into despicable realities; and pillars which looked ponderous and immovable at a distance, melt at the touch into air, and are found to be only masses of vapour and of cloud. He neither raises us to the skies, nor "brings his angels down," but astonishes by a phantasmagoria of strange appearances, sometimes scarcely distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, but which, when most clearly defined, come not near us, nor claim kindred by a warm and living touch. This chill remoteness from humanity is attended by a general want of harmony and proportion in the whole-by a wild excursiveness of sensibility and thoughtwhich add to its ungenial influence, and may be traced to the same causes.

THE author of Montorio and of Bertram is | twine with the heart-strings, and which keep unquestionably a person gifted with no ordinary powers. He has a quick sensibility-a penetrating and intuitive acuteness-and an unrivalled vigour and felicity of language, which enable him at one time to attain the happiest condensation of thought, and at others to pour forth a stream of eloquence, rich, flowing, and deep, checkered with images of delicate loveliness, or darkened by broad shadows cast from objects of stern and adamantine majesty. Yet, in common with many other potent spirits of the present time, he fails to excite within us any pure and lasting sympathy. We do not, on reading his works, feel that we have entered on a precious and imperishable treasure. They dazzle, they delight, they surprise, and they weary us-we lay them down with a vague admiration for the author, and try to shake off their influence as we do the impressions of a feverish dream. It is not thus that we receive the productions of genuine and holy bards-of Shakspeare, of Milton, of Spenser, or of Wordsworth-whose farreaching imaginations come home to our hearts, who become the companions of our sweetest moods, and with whom we long to "set up our everlasting rest." Their creations are often nearest to our hearts when they are farthest removed from the actual experience of our lives. We travel on the bright tracks which their genius reveals to us as safely and If we were disposed to refer these defects to with as sure and fond a tread as along the one general source, we should attribute them broad highway of the world. When the re- to the want of an imagination proportionate to gions which they set before us are the most sensibility and to mastery of language in the distant from our ordinary perceptions, we yet writer's mind, or to his comparative neglect of seem at home in them, their wonders are that most divine of human faculties. It is edistrangely familiar to us, and the scene, over-fying to observe how completely the nature of spread with a consecrating and lovely lustre, breaks on us, not as a wild fantastic novelty, but as a revived recollection of some holier life, which the soul rejoices thus delightfully to recognise.

Not thus do the works of Mr. Maturin-original and surprising as they often are-affect us. They have no fibres in them which en

this power is mistaken by many who profess to decide on matters of taste. They regard it as something wild and irregular, the reverse of truth, nature, and reason, which is divided from insanity only by "a thin partition," and which, uncontrolled by sterner powers, forms the essence of madness. They think it abounds in speeches crowded with tawdry and

superfluous epithets-in the discourses of Dr. | and moral beauty-that imagination really puts Chalmers, because they deal so largely in in- forth its divine energies. We do not charge finite obscurities that there is no room for a on Mr. Maturin that he is destitute of power single image-and in the poems of Lord Byron, to do this, or that he does not sometimes direct because his characters are so unlike all beings it to its purest uses. But his sensibility is so which have ever existed. Far otherwise thought much more quick and subtle than his authority Spencer when he represented the laurel as the over his impressions is complete; the flow of meed-not of poets insane-but "of poets his words so much more copious and facile SAGE." True imagination is, indeed, the deep than the throng of images on his mind; that eye of the profoundest wisdom. It is opposed he too often confounds us with unnumbered to reason, not in its results, but in its process; snatches and imperfect gleams of beauty, or it does not demonstrate truth only because it astonishes us by an outpouring of eloquent sees it. There are vast and eternal realities bombast, instead of enriching our souls with in our nature, which reason proves to exist-distinct and vivid conceptions. Like many which sensibility "feels after and finds"-and other writers of the present time-especially which imagination beholds in clear and solemn of his own country-he does not wait until vision, and pictures with a force and vividness the stream which young enthusiasm sets loose which assures their existence even to ungifted shall work itself clear, and calmly reflect the mortals. Its subjects are the true, the univer- highest heavens. His creations bear any sal, and the lasting. Its distinguishing pro- stamp but that of truth and soberness. He perty has no relation to dimness, or indistinct- sees the glories of the external world, and the ness, or dazzling radiance, or turbulent con- mightier wonders of man's moral and intelfusedness, but is the power of setting all things lectual nature, with a quick sense, and feels in the clearest light, and bringing them into them with an exquisite sympathy-but he perfect harmony. Like the telescope it does gazes on them in "very drunkenness of heart," not only magnify celestial objects, but brings and becomes giddy with his own indistinct them nearer to us. Of all the faculties it is emotions, till all things seem confounded in a the severest and the most unerring. Reason gay bacchanalian dance, and assume strange may beguile with splendid sophistry; sensibi- fantastic combinations; which, when translity may fatally misguide; but if imagination ferred to his works, startle for a moment, but exists at all, it must exhibit only the real. A do not produce that "sober certainty of waking mirror can no more reflect an object which is bliss" which real imagination assures. There not before it, than the imagination can show are two qualities necessary to form a truly the false and the baseless. By revealing to us imaginative writer-a quicker and an intenser its results in the language of imagery, it gives feeling than ordinary men possess for the beauto them almost the evidence of the senses. If tiful and the sublime, and the calm and medithe analogy between an idea and its physical tative power of regulating, combining, and arexponent is not complete, there is no effort ranging its own impressions, and of distinctly of imagination-if it is, the truth is seen, and bodying forth the final results of this harmofelt, and enjoyed, like the colours and forms nizing process. Where the first of these proof the material universe. And this effect is perties exists, the last is, perhaps, attainable produced not only with the greatest possible by that deep and careful study which is more certainty, but in the fewest possible words. necessary to a poet than to any artist who Yet even when this is done-when the illus- works in mere earthly materials. But this tration is not only the most enchanting, but study many of the most gifted of modern the most convincing of proofs-the writer is writers unhappily disdain; and if mere sale too often contemptuously depreciated as flowery, and popularity are their objects, they are right; by the advocates of mere reason. Strange for, in the multitude, the wild, the disjointed, the chance! that he who has imbodied truth in a incoherent, and the paradoxical, which are but living image, and thus rendered it visible to for a moment, necessarily awaken more immethe intellectual perceptions, should be con- diate sensation than the pure and harmonious, founded with those who conceal all sense and which are destined to last while nature and meaning beneath mere verbiage and fragments the soul shall endure. of disjointed metaphor!

Thus the products of genuine imagination are "all compact." It is, indeed, only the compactness and harmony of its pictures which give to it its name or its value. To discover that there are mighty elements in humanity to observe that there are bright hues and graceful forms in the external world -and to know the fitting names of these-is all which is required to furnish out a rich stock of spurious imagination to one who aspires to the claim of a wild and irregular genius. For him a dictionary is a sufficient guide to Parnassus. It is only by representing those intellectual elements in their finest harmony-by combining those hues and forms in the fairest pictures or by making the glorious combinations of external things the symbols of truth

It is easy to perceive how it is that the imperfect creations of men of sensibility and of eloquence strike and dazzle more at the first, than the completest works of truly imaginative poets. A perfect statue-a temple fashioned with exactest art-appear less, at a mere glance, from the nicety of their proportions. The vast majority of readers, in an age like ours, have neither leisure nor taste to seek and ponder over the effusions of holiest genius. They must be awakened into admiration by something new and strange and surprising; and the more remote from their daily thoughts and habits-the more fantastical and daringthe effort, the more will it please, because the more it will rouse them. Thus a man who will exhibit some impossible combination of heroism and meanness-of virtue and of vico

in the tones of the sepulchre, glides through the thickest walls, haunts two distant brothers in their most secret retirements through their strange wanderings, leads one of his victims to a scene which he believes infernal, and there terrifies him with sights of the wildest magic-and who after all this, and after really vindicating to the fancy his claim to the supernatural by the fearful cast of his language-is discovered to be a low impostor, who has produced all by the aid of poor tricks and secret passages! Where is the policy of this? Unless, by his power, the author had given a credibility to magic through four-fifths of his work, it never could have excited any feeling but that of impatience or of scorn. And when we have surrendered ourselves willingly to his guidance-when we have agreed to believe impossibilities at his bidding

-of heavenly love and infernal malignity and | in this story, a being whom we are long led baseness-will receive their wonder and their to believe is not of this world-who speaks praise. They call this POWER, which is in reality the most pitiable weakness. It is because a writer has not imagination enough to exhibit in new forms the universal qualities of nature and the soul, that he takes some strange and horrible anomaly as his theme. Incompetent to the divine task of rendering beauty "a simple product of the common day," he tries to excite emotion by disclosing the foulest recess of the foulest heart. As he strikes only one feeling, and that coarsely and ungently, he appears to wield a mightier weapon than he whose harmonious beauty sheds its influence equably over the whole of the sympathies. That which touches with strange commotion, and mere violence on the heart, but leaves no image there, seems to vulgar spirits more potent than the faculty which applies to it all perfect figures, and leaves them to sink gently into its fleshly tablets to remain there for ever. Yet, surely, that which merely shakes is not equal even in power to that which impresses. The wild disjointed part may be more amazing to a diseased perception than the well-compacted whole; but it is the nice balancing of properties, the soft blending of shades, and the all-pervading and reconciling light shed over the harmonious imagination, which take off the sense of rude strength that alone is discernible in its naked elements. Is there more of heavenly power in seizing from among the tumult of chaos and eternal night, strange and fearful abortions, or in brooding over the vast abyss, and making it pregnant with life and glory and joy? Is it the higher exercise of human faculties to represent the frightful discordances of passion, or to show the grandeurs of humanity in that majestic repose which is at once an anticipation and a proof of its eternal destiny? Is transitory vice-the mere accident of the species-and those vices too which are the rarest and most appalling of all its accidents-or that good which is its essence and which never can perish, fittest for the uses of the bard? Shall he desire to haunt the caves which lie lowest on the banks of Acheron, or the soft bowers watered by "Siloa's brook that flows fast by the oracle of God?"

Mr. Maturin gave decisive indications of a morbid sensibility and a passionate eloquence out-running his imaginative faculties, in the commencement of his literary career. His first romance, the "Family of Montorio," is one of the wildest and strangest of all "false creations proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain." It is for the most part a tissue of magnificent yet unappalling horrors. Its great faults as a work of amusement, are the long and unrelieved series of its gloomy and marvellous scenes, and the unsatisfactory explanation of them all, as arising from mere human agency. This last error he borrowed from Mrs. Ratcliffe, to whom he is far inferior in the economy of terrors, but whom he greatly transcends in the dark majesty of his style. As his events are far more wild and wondrous | than hers, so his development is necessarily far more incredible and vexatious. There is,

why does he reward our credence with derision, and tacitly reproach us for not having detected his idle mockeries? After all, too, the reason is no more satisfied than the fancy; for it would be a thousand times easier to believe in the possibility of spiritual influences, than in a long chain of mean contrivances, no one of which could ever succeed. The first is but one wonder, and that one to which our nature has a strange leaning; the last are numberless, and have nothing to reconcile them to our thoughts. In submitting to the former, we contentedly lay aside our reasoning facul ties; in approaching the latter our reason itself is appealed to at the moment when it is insulted. Great talent is, however, unquestionably exhibited in this singular story. A stern justice breathes solemnly through all the scenes in the devoted castle. "Fate sits on its dark battlements, and frowns." There is a spirit of deep philosophy in the tracing of the gradual influence of patricidal thoughts on the hearts of the brothers, which would finally exhibit the danger of dallying with evil fancies, if the subject were not removed so far from all ordinary temptations. Some of the scenes of horror, if they were not accumulated until they wear out their impression, would produce an effect inferior to none in the works of Ratcliffe or of Lewis. The scene in which Flippo escapes from the assassins, deserves to be ranked with the robber-scenes in the Monk and Count Fathom. The diction of the whole is rich and energetic-not, indeed, flowing in a calm beauty which may glide on for everbut impetuous as a mountain torrent, which, though it speedily passes away, leaves behind it no common spoils

"Depositing upon the silent shore

Of memory, images and gentle thoughts

Which cannot die, and will not be destroyed." "The Wild Irish Boy" is, on the whole, inferior to Montorio, though it served to give a farther glimpse into the vast extent of the author's resources. "The Milesian" is, perhaps, the most extraordinary of his romances. There is a bleak and misty grandeur about it, which, in spite of its glaring defects, sustains for it an abiding-place in the soul. Yet never, perhaps, was there a more unequal production

alternately exhibiting the grossest plagiarism | rendered popular, not by its poetical beauties, and the wildest originality—now swelling into but by the violence with which it jars on the offensive bombast, and anon disclosing the sensibilities, and awakens the sluggish heart simplest majesty of nature, fluctuating with from its lethargy. "Manuel," its successor, inconstant ebb between the sublime and the feebler, though in the same style, excited little ridiculous, the delicate and the revolting. attention, and less sympathy. In "Fredolpho," "Women, or Pour et Contre," is less unequal, the author, as though he had resolved to sting but we think, on the whole, less interesting the public into a sense of his power, crowded than the author's earlier productions. He together characters of such matchless deprashould not venture, as in this work he has vity, sentiments of such a demoniac cast, and done, into the ordinary paths of existence. events of such gratuitous horror, that the His persons, if not cast in a high and heroic moral taste of the audience, injured as it had mould, have no stamp of reality upon them. been by the success of similar works, felt the The reader of this work, though often dazzled insult, and rose up indignantly against it. Yet and delighted, has a painful feeling that the in this piece were passages of a soft and characters are shadowy and unreal, like that mournful beauty, breathing a tender air of which is experienced in dreams. They are romance, which led us bitterly to regret that unpleasant and tantalizing likenesses, ap- the poet chose to "embower the spirit of a proaching sufficiently near to the true to make fiend, in mortal paradise of such sweet" song. us feel what they would be and lament what We do not, however despair even yet of the they are. Eva, Zaira, the manaic mother, and regeneration of our author's taste. There has the group of Calvinists, have all a resemblance always been something of humanity to redeem to nature-and sometimes to nature at its most those works in which his genius has been passionate or its sweetest-but they look as at most perverted. There is no deliberate sneera distance from us, as though between us and ing at the disinterested and the pure-no cold them there were some veil, or discolouring derision of human hopes-no deadness to the medium, to baffle and perplex us. Still the lonely and the loving, in his writings. His novel is a splendid work; and gives the feel- error is that of a hasty trusting to feverish im. ing that its author has "riches fineless" in pulses, not of a malignant design. There is store, which might delight as well as astonish far more of the soul of goodness in his evil the world, if he would cease to be their slave, things, than in those of the noble bard whose and become their master. example has assisted to mislead him. He does not, indeed, know so well how to place his unnatural characters in imposing attitudes-to work up his morbid sensibilities for sale-or to "build the lofty rhyme" on shattered principles, and the melancholy fragments of hope. But his diction is more rich, his fancy is more fruitful, and his compass of thought and feeling more extensive. Happy shall we be to see him doing justice at last to his powersstudying not to excite the wonder of a few barren readers or spectators, but to live in the hearts of the good of future times-and, to this high end, leaving discord for harmony, the startling for the true, and the evil which, however potent, is but for a season, for the pure and the holy which endure for ever!

In the narrow boundaries of the Drama the redundancies of Mr. Maturin have been necessarily corrected. In this walk, indeed, there seems reason to believe that his genius would have grown purer, as it assumed a severer attitude; and that he would have sought to attain high and true passion, and lofty imagination, had he not been seduced by the admiration unhappily lavished on Lord Byron's writings. The feverish strength, the singular blending of good and evil, and the spirit of moral paradox, displayed in these works, were congenial with his tastes, and aroused in him the desire to imitate. "Bertram," his first and most successful tragedy, is a fine piece of writing, wrought out of a nauseous tale, and

REVIEW OF RYMER'S WORKS ON TRAGEDY.

[RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW.]

THESE are very curious and edifying works. The author (who was the compiler of the Fadera) appears to have been a man of considerable acuteness, maddened by a furious zeal for the honour of tragedy. He lays down the most fantastical rules for the composition which he chiefly reverses, and argues on them as " truths of holy writ." He criticises Shakspeare as one invested with authority to sit in judgment on his powers, and passes on him as decisive a sentence of condemnation, as ever was awarded against a friendless poet by a Re

viewer. We will select a few passages from his work, which may be consolatory to modern authors and useful to modern critics.

The chief weight of Mr. Rymer's critical vengeance is wreaked on Othello. After a slight sketch of the plot, he proceeds at once to speak of the moral, which he seems to regard as of the first importance in tragedy.

"Whatever rubs or difficulty may stick on the bark, the moral use of this fable is very instructive. First, this may be a caution to all maidens of quality, how, without their parents'