drous tales. When we read them, the world seems shut out, and we breathe only in an enchanted region, where lover's lutes tremble over placid waters, mouldering castles rise conscious of deeds of blood, and the sad voices of the past echo through deep vaults and lonely galleries. There is always majesty in her terrors. She produces more effect by whispers and slender hints than ever was attained by the most vivid display of horrors. Her conclusions are tame and impotent almost without example. But while her spells actually operate, her power is truly magical. Who can spiritual stores of his own heart. It is, indeed, | of gratitude, Mrs. Radcliffe's wild and won only the last which gives value to the first in his writings. It is easy to endow men with millions on paper, and to make them willing to scatter them among the wretched; but it is the corresponding bounty and exuberance of the author's soul, which here makes the money sterling, and the charity divine. The hero of this romance always appears to our imagination like a radiant vision encircled with celestial glories. The stories introduced in it are delightful exceptions to the usual rule by which such incidental tales are properly regarded as impertinent intrusions. That of David Doubtful is of the most romantic in-ever forget the scene in the Romance of the terest, and at the same time steeped in feeling the most profound. But that of Clement and his wife is perhaps the finest. The scene in which they are discovered, having placidly lain down to die of hunger together, in gentle submission to Heaven, depicts a quiescence the most sublime, yet the most affecting. Nothing can be more delightful than the sweetening ingredients in their cup of sorrow. The heroic act of the lady to free herself from her ravisher's grasp, her trial and her triumphant acquittal, have a grandeur above that of tragedy. The genial spirit of the author's The present age has produced a singular faith leads him to exult especially in the re- number of authors of delightful prose fiction, pentance of the wicked. No human writer on whom we intend to give a series of critiseems ever to have hailed the contrite with so cisms. We shall begin with MACKENZIE, cordial a welcome. His scenes appear over-whom we shall endeavour to compare with spread with a rich atmosphere of tenderness, Sterne, and for this reason we have passed which softens and consecrates all things. over the works of the latter in our present cur Forest, where the marquis, who has long sought to make the heroine the victim of licen tious love, after working on her protector, over whom he has a mysterious influence, to steal at night into her chamber, and when his trembling listener expects only a requisition for delivering her into his hands, replies to the question of "then-to-night, my Lord!" "Adelaide dies"-or the allusions to the dark veil in the Mysteries of Udolpho-or the stupendous scenes in Spalatro's cottage? Of all romance writers Mrs. Radcliffe is the most romantic. We would not pass over, without a tribute sory view of the novelists of other days. MACKENZIE. [NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.] ALTHOUGH Our veneration for Mackenzie has induced us to commence this series of articles with an attempt to express our sense of his genius, we scarcely know how to criticise its exquisite creations. The feelings which they have awakened within us are too old and too sacred almost for expression. We scarcely dare to scrutinize with a critic's ear, the blending notes of that sad and soft music of humanity which they breathe. We feel as if there were a kind of privacy in our sympathies with them as though they were a part of ourselves, which strangers knew not-and as if in publicly expressing them, we were violating the sanctities of our own souls. We must recollect, however, that our readers know them as well as we do, and then to dwell with them tenderly on their merits will seem like discoursing of the long-cherished memories of friends we had in common, and of sorrows participated in childhood. The purely sentimental style in which the tales of Mackenzie are written, though deeply felt by the people, has seldom met with due appreciation from the critics. It has its own genuine and peculiar beauties, which we love the more the longer we feel them. Its consecrations are altogether drawn from the soul. The gentle tinges which it casts on human life are shed, not from the imagination or the fancy, but from the affections. It represents, indeed, humanity as more tender, its sorrows as more gentle, its joys as more abundant than they appear to common observers. But this is not effected by those influences of the imagination which consecrate whatever they touch, which detect the secret analogies of beauty, and bring kindred graces from all parts of nature to heighten the images which they reveal. It affects us rather by casting off from the soul those impurities and littlenesses which it contracts in the world, than by foreign aids. It appeals to those simple emotions which are not the high prerogatives of genius, but which are common to all who are "made of one blood," and partake in one primal sympathy. The holiest feelings, after all, are those which would be the most common if gross selfish ever. ness and low ambition froze not "the genial | as sacred treasures. The sorrows over which current of the soul." The meanest and most it sheds its influence are "ill-bartered for the ungifted have their gentle remembrances of garishness of joy;" for they win us softly from early days. Love has tinged the life of the life, and fit us to die smiling. It endures, not artisan and the cottager with something of the only while fortune changes, but while opinions romantic. The course of none has been along vary, which the young enthusiast fondly hoped so beaten a road that they remember not fondly would never forsake him. It remains when some resting-places in their journeys; some the unsubstantial pageants of goodliest hope turns of their path in which lovely prospects vanish. It binds the veteran to the child by broke in upon them; some soft plats of green ties which no fluctuations even of belief can refreshing to their weary feet. Confiding love, alter. It preserves the only identity, save that generous friendship, disinterested humanity, of consciousness, which man with certainty require no recondite learning, no high imagi- retains-connecting our past with our present nation, to enable an honest heart to appreciate being by delicate ties, so subtle that they viand feel them. Too often, indeed, are the sim- brate to every breeze of feeling; yet so strong plicities of nature and the native tendernesses that the tempests of life have not power to of the soul nipped and chilled by those anxie- break them. It assures us that what we have ties which lie on them "like an untimely frost." been we shall be, and that our human hearts "The world is too much with us." We be- shall vibrate with their first sympathies while come lawyers, politicians, merchants, and for- the species shall endure. get that we are men, and sink in our transitory We think that, on the whole, Mackenzie is vocations that character which is to last for the first master of this delicious style. Sterne, A tale of sentiment-such as those of doubtless, has deeper touches of humanity in that honoured veteran whose works we would some of his works. But there is no sustained now particularly remember-awakens all these feeling-no continuity of emotion-no extendpulses of sympathy with our kind, of whose ed range of thought, over which the mind can beatings we had become almost unconscious. brood in his ingenious and fantastical writings. It does honour to humanity by stripping off its His spirit is far too mercurial and airy to suffer artificial disguises. Its magic is not like that him tenderly to linger over those images of by which Arabian enchanters raised up glit- sweet humanity which he discloses. His cletering spires, domes, and palaces by a few ca- verness breaks the charm which his feeling balistic words; but resembles their power to spreads, as by magic, around us. His exquidisclose veins of precious ore where all seemed site sensibility is ever counteracted by his per sterile and blasted. It gently puts aside the ceptions of the ludicrous, and his ambition brambles which overcast the stream of life, after the strange. No harmonious feeling and lays it open to the reflections of those deli- breathes from any of his pieces. He sweeps cate clouds which lie above it in the heavens."that curious instrument, the human heart," It shows to us the soft undercourses of feeling, which neither time nor circumstances can wholly stop; and the depth of affection in the soul, which nothing but sentiment itself can fathom. It disposes us to pensive thoughtexpands the sympathies-and makes all the half-forgotten delights of youth come back upon our hearts again," to soften and to cheer us. Too often has the sentiment of which we have spoken been confounded with sickly affectations in a common censure. But no things can be more opposite than the paradoxes of the inferior order of German sentimentalists and the works of a writer like Mackenzie. Real sentiment is the truest, the most genuine, and the most lasting thing on earth. It is more ancient as well as more certain in its operations than the reasoning faculties. We know and feel before we think; we perceive before we compare; we enjoy before we believe. As the evidence of sense is stronger than that of testimony, so the light of our inward eye more truly shows to us the secrets of the heart than the most elaborate process of reason. Riches, honours, power, are transitory-the things which appear, pass away-the shadows of life alone are stable and unchanging. Of the recollections of infancy nothing can deprive us. Love endures, even if its object perishes, and nurtures the soul of the mourner. Sentiment has a kind of divine alchymy, rendering grief itself the source of tenderest thoughts and farreaching desires, which the sufferer cherishes with hurried fingers, calling forth in rapid succession its deepest and its liveliest tones, and making only marvellous discord. His pathos is, indeed, most genuine while it lasts; but the soul is not suffered to cherish the feeling which it awakens. He does not shed, like Mackenzie, one mild light on the path of life; but scatters on it wild coruscations of evershifting brightness, which, while they sometimes disclose spots of inimitable beauty, often do but fantastically play over objects dreary and revolting. All in Mackenzie is calm, gentle, harmonious. No play of mistimed wit, no flourish of rhetoric, no train of philosophical speculation, for a moment di. verts our sympathy. Each of his best works is like one deep thought, and the impression which it leaves, soft, sweet, and undivided as the summer evening's holiest and latest sigh. The only exception which we can make to this character, is the Man of the World. Here the attempt to obtain intricacy of plot disturbs the emotion which, in the other works of the author, is so harmoniously excited. A tale of sentiment should be most simple. Its whole effect depends on its keeping the tenor of its predominant feeling unbroken. Another defect in this story is, the length of time over which it spreads its narrative. Sindall, alone, connects the two generations which it embraces, and he is too mean and uninteresting thus to appear both as the hero and the chorus When a story is thus continued from a mother to a daughter, it seems to have no legitimate Our boundary. The painful remembrances of the matchless in their kind. Never was so much former interferes with our interest for the of the terrific alleviated by so much of the latter, and the present difficulties of the last pitiful. The incidents are most tragic; yet deprive us of those emotions of fond retro-over them is diffused a breath of sweetness, spection, which the fate of the first would which softens away half their anguish, and otherwise awaken. Still there are in this tale reconciles us to that which remains. scenes of pathos delicious as any which even minds are prepared, long before, for the early the author himself has drawn. The tender nipping of that delicate blossom, for which pleasure which the Man of Feeling excites is this world was too bleak. Julia's last interwholly without alloy. Its hero is the most view with Savillon mitigates her doom, partly beautiful personification of gentleness, pa- by the joy her heart has tasted, and which tience, and meek sufferings, which the heart nothing afterwards in life could equal, and can conceive. Julia de Roubigné, however, is, partly by the certainty that she must either on the whole, the most delightful of the au- become guilty or continue wretched. Nothing thor's works. There is, in this tale, enough of can be at once sweeter and more affecting plot to keep alive curiosity, and sharpen the than her ecstatic dream after she has taken interest which the sentiment awakens, without the fatal mixture, her seraphical playing on any of those strange turns and perplexing the organ, to which the waiting angels seem incidents which break the current of sympa- to listen, and her tranquil recalling the scenes thy. The diction is in perfect harmony with of peaceful happiness with her friend, as she the subject-"most musical, most melan- imagines her arms about her neck, and fancies choly" with "golden cadences" responsive that her Maria's tears are falling on her boto the thoughts. There is a plaintive charm som. Then comes Montaubon's description in the image presented to us of the heroine, of her as she drank the poison :-"She took too fair almost to dwell on. How exquisite is it from me smiling, and her look seemed to the description given of her by her maid, in a lose its confusion. She drank my health! letter to her friend, relating to her fatal mar- She was dressed in her white silk bed-gown, riage:"She was dressed in a white muslin ornamented with pale, pink ribands. Her night-gown, with striped lilac and white cheek was gently flushed from their reflection; ribands; her hair was kept in the loose way her blue eyes were turned upwards as she you used to make me dress it for her at Bel- drank, and a dark-brown ringlet lay on her ville, with two waving curls down one side shoulder." We do not think even the fate of of her neck, and a braid of little pearls. And "the gentle lady married to the Moor" calls to be sure, with her dark, brown locks resting forth tears so sweet as those which fall for the upon it, her bosom looked as pure white as Julia of Mackenzie ! the driven snow. And then her eyes, when she gave her hand to the count! they were cast down, and you might see her eyelashes, like strokes of a pencil, over the white of her skin-the modest gentleness, with a sort of sadness too, as it were, and a gentle heave of her bosom at the same time." And yet, such is the feeling communicated to us by the whole work, that we are ready to believe even this artless picture an inadequate representa-young imagination shall vanish, and the tion of that beauty which we never cease to feel. How natural and tear-moving is the letter of Savillon to his friend, describing the scenes of his early love, and recalling, with intense vividness, all the little circumstances which aided its progress! What an idea, in a single expression, does Julia give of the depth and the tenderness of her affection, when describing herself as taking lessons in drawing from her lover, sne says that she felt" shall hang upon the beatings of their hearts," something from the touch of his hand "not the less delightful from carrying a sort of fear along with that delight: it was like a pulse in the soul!" The last scenes of this novel are We rejoice to know and feel that these delicious tales cannot perish. Since they were written, indeed, the national imagination has been, in a great degree, perverted by strong excitements, and "fed on poisons till they have become a kind of nutriment." But the quiet and unpresuming beauties of these works depend not on the fashion of the world. They cannot be out of date till the dreams of deepest sympathies of love and hope shall be chilled for ever. While other works are extolled, admired, and reviewed, these will be loved and wept over. Their author, in the evening of his days, may truly feel that he has not lived in vain. Gentle hearts shall ever blend their thought of him among their remembrances of the benefactors of their youth. And when the fever of the world how often will their spirits turn to him, who, as he cast a soft seriousness over the morning of life, shall assist in tranquillizing its noon tide sorrows! "THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY." Here are we in a bright and breathing world.-Wordsworth. [NEW MONTHly Magazine.] WB esteem the productions which the great | the spirit of gladness. There is little of a medi. novelist of Scotland has poured forth with tative or retrospective cast in his works. startling speed from his rich treasury, not Whatever age he chooses for his story, lives only as multiplying the sources of delight to before us: we become contemporaries of all thousands, but as shedding the most genial his persons, and sharers in all their fortunes influences on the taste and feeling of the peo- Of all men who have ever written, excepting ple. These, with their fresh spirit of health, Shakspeare, he has perhaps the least of exhave counteracted the workings of that blast- clusiveness, the least of those feelings which ing spell by which the genius of Lord Byron keep men apart from their kind. He has his once threatened strangely to fascinate and de- own predilections-and we love him the better base the vast multitude of English readers. for them, even when they are not ours-but Men, seduced by their noble poet, had begun they never prevent him from grasping with to pay homage to mere energy, to regard vir- cordial spirit all that is human. His tolerance tue as low and mean compared with lofty is the most complete, for it extends to adverse crime, and to think that high passion carried bigotries; his love of enjoyment does not in itself a justification for its most fearful ex- exclude the ascetic from his respect, nor does cesses. He inspired them with a feeling of his fondness for hereditary rights and timediseased curiosity to know the secrets of dark honoured institutions prevent his admiration bosoms, while he opened his own perturbed of the fiery zeal of a sectary. His genius spirit to their gaze. His works, and those im- shines with an equal light on all-illuminating ported from Germany, tended to give to our the vast hills of purple heath, the calm breast imagination an introspective cast, to perplex of the quiet water, and the rich masses of the it with metaphysical subtleties, and to render grove-now gleaming with a sacred light on our poetry "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of the distant towers of some old monastery, thought." The genius of our country was now softening the green-wood shade, now thus in danger of being perverted from its piercing the gloom of the rude cave where purest uses to become the minister of vain the old Covenanter lies-free and universal, philosophy, and the anatomist of polluted and bounteous as the sun-and pouring its radiance with a like impartiality "upon a living and rejoicing world.” natures. We shall not attempt, in this slight sketch, to follow our author regularly through all his rich and varied creations; but shall rather consider his powers in general of natural description-of skill in the delineation of character-and of exciting high and poetical interest, by the gleams of his fancy, the tragic elevation of his scenes, and the fearful touches which he delights to borrow from the world of spirits. "The author of Waverley" (as he delights to be styled) has weaned it from its idols, and restored to it its warm, youthful blood, and human affections. Nothing can be more opposed to the gloom, the inward revolvings, and morbid speculations, which the world once seemed inclined to esteem as the sole prerogatives of the bard, than his exquisite creations. His persons are no shadowy abstractions-no personifications of a dogmano portraits of the author varied in costume, but similar in features. With all their rich In the vivid description of natural scenery varieties of character, whether their heroical our author is wholly without a rival, unless spirit touches on the godlike, or their wild Sir Walter Scott will dispute the pre-eminence eccentricities border on the farcical, they are with him; and, even then, we think the novel men fashioned of human earth, and warm ist would be found to surpass the bard. The with human sympathies. He does not seek free grace of nature has, of late, contributed for the sublime in the mere intensity of burn- little to the charm of our highest poetry. Lord ing passion, or for sources of enjoyment in Byron has always, in his reference to the mathose feverish gratifications which some would jestic scenery of the universe, dealt rather in teach us to believe the only felicities worthy grand generalities than minute pictures, has of high and impassioned souls. He writes used the turbulence of the elements as symeverywhere with a keen and healthful relish bols of inward tempests, and sought the vast for all the good things of life-constantly re- solitudes and deep tranquillity of nature, but freshes us where we least expected it, with a to assuage the fevers of the soul. Wordsworth sense of that pleasure which is spread through-who, amidst the contempt of the ignorant the earth" to be caught in stray gifts by who- and of the worldly wise, has been gradually ever will find," and brightens all things with and silently moulding all the leading spirits 12 of the age-has sought communion with na- us. Our recollection never confounds any one the fond delight with which he dwells on their redeeming features. We seem to know every little plot of green, every thicket of copse-wood, and every turn and cascade of the stream in the vale of Glendearg, and to remember each low bush in the barren scene of her skirmish between the Covenanters and Claverhouse, as though we had been familiar with it in childhood. The descriptions of this author are manifestly rendered more vivid by the intense love which he bears to his country-not only to her luxuriant and sublime scenery, but "her bare earth, and mountains bare, and grass in the green field." He will scarcely leave a brook, a mountain ash, or a lichen on the rocks of her shore, without due honour. He may fitly be regarded as the genius of Scotland, who has given her a poetical interest, a vast place in the imagination, which may almost compensate for the loss of that political independence, the last struggling love for which he so nobly celebrates. "The author of Waverley" is, however, chiefly distinguished by the number, the spirit, and the individuality of his characters. We know not, indeed, where to begin or to end with the vast crowd of their genial and noble shapes which come thronging on our memory. His ludicrous characters are dear to us, because they are seldom merely quaint or strange, the dry oddities of fancy, but have as genuine a kindred with humanity as the most gifted and enthusiastic of their fellows. The laughter which they excite is full of social sympathy, and we love them and our nature the better while we indulge it. Whose heart does not claim kindred with Baillie Nichol Jarvie, while the Glasgow weaver, without losing one of his nice peculiarities, kindles into honest warmth with his ledger in hand, and in spite of broad-cloth grows almost romantic? In whom does a perception of the ludicrous for a moment injure the veneration which the brave, stout-hearted and chivalrous Baron of Bradwardine inspires? Who shares not in the fond enthusiasm of Oldbuck for black letter, in his eager and tremulous joy at grasping rare books at low prices, and in his discoveries of Roman camps and monuments which we can hardly forgive Edie Ochiltree for disproving? Compared with these genial persons, the portraits of mere singularity-however inimitably finished-are harsh and cold; of these, indeed, the works of our author afford scarcely more than one signal example-Captain Dalgettywho is a mere piece of ingenious mechanism, like the automaton chess-player, and with all his cleverness, gives us little pleasure, for he excites as little sympathy. Almost all the persons cf these novels, diversified as they are, are really endowed with some deep and elevating enthu siasm, which, whether breaking through eccentricities of manner, perverted by error, or mingled with crime, ever asserts the majesty of our nature, its deep affections, and undying powers. This is true, not only of the divine enthusiasm of Flora Mac Ivor of the sweet heroism of Jeannie Deans-of the angelic tenderness and fortitude of Rebecca, but of the puritanic severities and awful zeal of Balfour of Burley, and the yet more frightful energy of Macbriar, equally ready to sacrifice a blame |