records of England's innumerable triumphs, by sea and land, together with sketches of the manners, habits, and feelings of our soldiers and sailors.

§ 2. I. ROMANCES.-The history of modern prose fiction in England will be found to accord pretty closely with the classification we have just adopted. We have spoken in another place of the three patriarchs of the English novel-Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; and the immense class of works we are about to consider may be looked upon as totally distinct from the immortal productions of these great men, though the first impulse given to prose fiction will be found to have been in no sense communicated by Clarissa, Tom Jones, or Roderick Random. This impulse was given by HORACE WALPOLE (1717-1797), the fastidious dilettante and brilliant chronicler of the court scandal of his day; a man of singularly acute penetration, of sparkling epigrammatic style, but of a mind devoid of enthusiasm and elevation. Rather a French courtier in taste and habits than an English nobleman, he retired early from political life, veiling a certain consciousness of political incapacity under an effeminate and affected contempt for a parliamentary career, and shut himself up in his little fantastic Gothic castle of Strawberry Hill, to collect armour, medals, manuscripts, and painted glass, and to chronicle with malicious assiduity, in his vast and brilliant correspondence, the absurdities, follies, and weaknesses of his day. The Castle of Otranto is a short tale, written with great rapidity and without preparation, in which the first successful attempt was made to take the Feudal Age as the period, and the passion of mysterious, superstitious terror as the prime mover, of an interesting fiction. The supernatural machinery consists of a gigantic armed figure dimly seen at midnight in the gloomy halls and huge staircases of this feudal abode-of a colossal helmet which finds its way into the courtyard, filling everybody with dread and consternationof a picture which descends from its frame to upbraid a wicked oppressor—of a vast apparition at the end—and a liberal allowance of secret panels, subterranean passages, breathless pursuit and escape. The manners are totally absurd and unnatural, the heroine being one of those inconsistent portraits in which the sentimental languor of the eighteenth century is superadded to the female character of the Middle Ages-in short, one of those incongruous contradictions which we meet in all the romantic fictions before Scott.

§ 3. The immense success of Walpole's original and cleverlywritten tale encouraged other and more accomplished artists to follow in the same track. After mentioning CLARA REEVE (1725-1803), whose Old English Baron contains the same defects without the beauties of Walpole's haunted castle, we come to the

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great name of this class, ANN RADCLIFFE (1764-1823), whose numerous romances exhibit a surprising power (perhaps never equalled) over the emotions of fear and undefined mysterious suspense. Her two greatest works are, The Romance of the Forest, and The Mysteries of Udolpho. The scenery of her predilection is that of Italy and the south of France; and though she does not place the reader among the fierce and picturesque life of the Middle Ages, she has, perhaps, rather gained than lost by choosing the ruined castles of the Pyrenees and Apennines for the theatre, and the dark passions of profligate Italian counts for the principal moving power, of her wonderful fictions. The substance of them all is pretty nearly the same; and the author's total incapacity to paint individual character only makes us the more admire the power by which she interests us through the never-failing medium of suspense. Mystery is the whole spell. Nothing can be poorer and more conventional than the personages: they are not human beings, nor even the types of classes; they have no more individuality than the pieces of a chess-board; they are merely counters; but the skill with which the author juggles with them gives them a kind of awful necromantic interest. The characters are mere abstract algebraical expressions, but they are made the exponents of such terrible and intense fear, suffering, and suspense, that we sympathise with their fate as if they were real. Her repertory is very limited a persecuted sentimental young lady, a wicked and mysterious count, a haggard monk, a tattling but faithful waitingmaid,-such is the poor human element out of which these wonderful structures are created. Balzac, in one of his tales, speaks with great admiration of an artist who, by a few touches of his pencil, could give to a most commonplace scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of crime and blood. Through a half-opened door you see a bed with the clothes confusedly heaped, as in some death-struggle, over an undefined object which fancy whispers must be a bleeding corpse; on the floor you see a slipper, an upset candlestick, and a knife, perhaps; and these hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more powerfully than the most tremendous detail, because the imagination of man is more powerful than art itself:

"Over all there hung a cloud of fear,

A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper to the car,
The place is haunted."

The great defect of Ann Radcliffe's fictions is not their tediousness of description, nor even the somewhat mawkish sentimentality with which they may be reproached nor the feebly-elegant verses

which the heroines are represented as writing on all occasions (indeed all these things indirectly conduce to the effect by contrast and preparation); but the unfortunate principle she had imposed upon herself, of clearing up at the end of the story all the circumstances that appeared supernatural—of carrying us, as it were behind the scenes at the end of the play, and showing us the dirty ropes and trap-doors, the daubed canvas, the Bengal fire, by which these wonderful impressions had been produced. If we had supped after the play with the "blood-bolter'd Banquo," or the "majesty of buried Denmark," we should not probably be able to feel a due amount of terror the next time we saw them on the stage; but in Mrs. Radcliffe, where the feeling of terror is the principal thing aimed at, this discovery of the mechanism deprives us of all future interest in the story; for, after all, pure fear--sensual, not moral, fear-is by no means a legitimate object of high art.

§ 4. A class of writing apparently so easy, and likely to produce so powerful and universal an effect-an effect even more powerful on the least critical minds-was, of course, followed by a crowd of writers. Most of these have descended to oblivion and a deserved neglect. We may, however, say a few words upon Lewis, Maturin, and Mrs. Shelley. MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS (1775-1818), a good-natured effeminate man of fashion, the friend of Byron, and one of the early literary advisers of Scott, was the first to introduce into England a taste for the infant German literature of that day, with its spectral ballads and diablerie of all kinds. He was a man of lively and childish imagination; and besides his metrical translations of the ballads of Bürger, and others of the same class, he published in his twentieth year a prose romance called The Monk, full of horrible crimes and diabolic agency. It contains several passages of considerable power, particularly the episode of The Bleeding Nun, in which the wandering Jew-that godsend for all vriters, good, bad, and indifferent, of the " "intense or demoniac school—is introduced with picturesque effect; but the book owes its continued popularity (though, we are happy to say, only among half-educated young men and ecstatic milliners) chiefly to the licentious warmth of many of its scenes. CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (d. 1824) was an Irish clergyman of great promise and still greater vanity, who carried the intellectual merits and defects of his countrymen to an extreme little short of caricature: his imagination was vivid, and he possessed a kind of extravagant and convulsive eloquence, but his works are full of the most outrageous absurdities. He perpetually mistakes monstrosity for power, and lasciviousness for warmth. His life was short and unhappy. He wrote several romances, the chief of which is Melmoth, a farrago of impossible and inconceivable adventures, without plan or coherence, in which the

Devil (who is represented as an Irish gentleman of good family in the eighteenth century) is the chief agent. He was likewise the author of a tragedy named Bertram, which was acted with success at Drury Lane in 1816.

MRS. SHELLEY (1798-1851), the wife of the poet, and the daughter of W. Godwin, wrote in Italy, in 1816, the powerful tale of Frankenstein, in which a young student of physiology succeeds in constructing, out of the horrid remnants of the churchyard and dissecting-room, a kind of monster, to which he afterwards gives, apparently by the agency of galvanism, a kind of spectral and convulsive life. This existence, rendered insupportable to the monster by his vain cravings after human sympathy, and by his consciousness of his own deformity, is employed in inflicting (in some cases involuntarily) the most dreadful retribution on the guilty philosopher; and some of the chief appearances of the monster, particularly the moment when he begins to move for the first time, and, towards the end of the book, among the eternal snows of the arctic circle, are managed with a striking and breathless effect, that makes us for a moment forget the childish improbability and melodramatic extravagance of the tale.

§ 5. To this subdivision belong the works of that most easy and prolific writer, G. P. R. JAMES (1801-1862)—the most industrious, if not always most successful, imitator of Scott, in revival of chivalric and Middle-Age scenes. The number of James's works is immense, but they bear among themselves a family likeness so strong, and even oppressive, that it is impossible to consider this author otherwise than as an ingenious imitator and copyist-first of Scott, and secondly of himself. The spirit of repetition is, indeed, carried so far, that it is possible to guess beforehand, and with perfect certainty, the principal contents, and even the chief persons, of one of James's historical novels. His heroes and heroines, whose features are almost always gracefully and elegantly sketched in, have more of the English than continental character. We are sure to have a nondescript grotesque as a secondary personage—a halfcrazy jester, ever hovering between the hairbrained villain and the faithful retainer: we may count upon abundance of woodland scenery (often described with singular delicacy and tenderness of language) and moonlight rendezvous of robbers and conspirators. But whereas Scott has all these things, it must be remembered how much more he has beside. He looks through all things "with a learned spirit:" James stops short here, unless we notice his innumerable pictures of battles, tournaments, hunting-scenes, and old castles, where we find much more of the forced and artificial accuracy of the antiquary, than of the poet's all-embracing, all-imagining eye. James is particularly versed in the history of France, and

some of his most successful novels have reference to that country, among which we may mention Richelieu. His great deficiency is want of real, direct, powerful human passion, and consequently of life and movement in his intrigues. There is thrown over his fictions a general air of good-natured, frank, and well-bred refincment, which, however laudable, cannot fail to be found rather tiresome and monotonous.

§ 6. II. Our second subdivision-the Novels of real life and societyis so extensive that we can but throw a rapid glance on its principal productions. To do this consistently with clearness, we must begin rather far back, with the novels of Miss Burney. FRANces Burney (17521840) was the daughter of Dr. Burney, author of the History of Music. While yet residing at her father's house, she composed, in her stolen moments of leisure, the novel of Evelina, published in 1778, and is related not to have communicated to her father the secret of her having written it, until the astonishing success of the fiction rendered her avowal triumphant and almost necessary. Evelina was followed in 1782 by Cecilia, a novel of the same character. In 1786 Miss Burney received an appointment in the household of Queen Charlotte, where she remained till her marriage in 1793 with Count d'Arblay, a French refugee officer. She published, after her marriage, a novel entitled Camilla; and her name has more recently come before the public by her Diary and Letters, which appeared in 1842, after her death. The chief defect of her novels is vulgarity of feeling; not that falsely-called vulgarity which describes with congenial animation low scenes and humble personages, but the affectation of delicacy and refinement. The heroines are perpetually trembling at the thought of impropriety, and exhibit a nervous, restless dread of appearing indelicate, that absolutely renders them the very essence of vulgarity. All the difficulties and misfortunes in these plots arise from the want, on the part of the principal personages, of a little candour and straightforwardness, and would be set right by a few words of simple explanation: in this respect the authcress drew from herself; for her Diary exhibits her as existing in a perpetual fever of vanity and petty expedients; and in her gross affectation of more than feminine modesty and bashfulness-literary as well as personal-we see the painful, incessant flutter of her "darling sin""the pride that apes humility." Women are endowed by nature with a peculiar delicacy of tact and sensibility; and being excluded, by the existing laws of society, from taking an active part in the rougher struggles of life, they acquire much more than the other sex a singular penetration in judging of character from slight and external peculiarities. In acquiring this power they are manifestly aided by their really subordinate, though apparently supreme, position in society, by the seductions to which they are