refinement, or the compound of ignorance and meanness; but if it be not possible to carry them through the labyrinths of fiction so unlike human, the vices, faults and failings of the former are so interspersed with redeeming qualities, as to lessen, if not destroy, abhorrence for their conduct, and give the impression that vice, or at least some irregularity, is necessary to form a great character ;— at the same time, the inferior personages of the plot are described as grossly wicked and with scarcely the shadow of a virtue. The effect is, to strip vice of its odious nature and to form imperceptibly the habits of despising and looking down upon a portion of our fellow creatures.

Modern novels, although they employ neither giants to snatch a lady from nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity, are perhaps more bewitching in their nature and more dangerous in their tendency, than the romances of the middle centuries. They paint characters nearer the level of human life; and, therefore, are more likely to lead astray the young and inexperienced. The mind becomes inflamed with an ideal something which exists in the brain of the writer; whereas youth, especially, should acquire just views of human nature, and of the principles of action among men. Moreover, the passions of the young are warm and ardent. They need not the excitement of novels, either to build castles in the air, or to teach the imagination to soar.

Their great danger is of bloating the fancy without informing the understanding or maturing the judgment; of forming wild schemes of wealth or greatness, and of indulging in the raptures of success, till they forget or neglect the means necessary to secure it. But the worst feature in novel reading is, that it weakens the intellect and unfits it for close thinking. It induces superficial habits of mind, destroys its stability, and leaves it with the sentiments and opinions of the last read novel. No one ever rose from the perusal of a novel with as much mental vigor as he commenced; and if the intellect afterward recover its former strength, it is other causes which restore its tone and olasticity. Moreover, it creates a morbid and affected sensibility, offended by, it cares not what, and pleased with, it knows not whom. It produces the strange inconsistency of disregarding the actual sufferings of life, and weeping over scenes of distress which exist but in imagination.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN LITERATURE AND THE TEMPERANCE ENTERPRISE.

BY REV. URIAH MARVIN.

THE press of Europe and America is now every day flooding the reading community with a mawkish sentimentalism and a sickly fiction, which if unresisted, will sweep away the last vestige of man's social and moral nature. The novels of Scott, Bulwer, and a host of others, have done more to retard the sobriety, growth and purity of society than though they were the professed enemies of virtue. The reputation of these men gives to their sayings the force of law, and he would be thought conceited who should presume to question their propriety. Thus do they live and flourish, doing their deeds of death with impunity. That is a false modesty which will not rebuke evil, because its author is invested with the brilliancy of talent; and that talent which gives sanction to immorality of any kind, becomes so much the more destructive in its influence as its greatness is acknowledged and revered. There are drinking scenes by those authors, where all the energy of their minds appear concentrated in one burn

ing, glowing description. The flow of thought is so exquisitely polished in its language, and the riotous revelry is so masked with the garb of innocent gaiety, that all appearance of evil is taken away, leaving the heart of the reader free to the influence of the vilest sentiments and the most unmanly conduct. These scenes are the more injurious in their tendency, inasmuch as the actors of them are selected from the most prominent characters of the novel. This assertion is founded on a well known philosophical fact, that the effect of a vicious example is proportioned to the standing and character of the individual by whom it was given. Not interdicted in this country by the law of copy-right, these fictions are circulated far and near. They are seen in every store, in every public and private library, among all classes of society. The facilities for procuring them. being great and the price merely nominal, they are easily obtained; and when read, they are circulated among the younger members of the family and within the whole circle of acquaintance. If the powers of the human mind must be devoted to the encouragement of drunkenness, I can see the hand of a providence in allotting genius and talent to few and distant periods of time. It is well for the world that every rising generation has not grown up under the tutelage of such men as Byron or his boon companion Shelley. Had it been thus-this hour, I was going to say,

would have beheld us beyond the possibility of redemption. Uniting as they did the splendor of genius with the grossness of intemperance, and the sublime conception of the poet with the brutality of the beast, the youthful reader is dazzled into the admiration of the dark morality of their pages. I am glad their private lives are written, for I would have the young see, that while their genius was burning with the fumes of the bottle, the same fire was consuming the constitution and wasting the energies of the body.

"Full oft have they sung of the bowl,
As a soothing oblivion to sorrow:
Full oft have they sung, that the soul

A feast from the wine-cup may borrow:

'Tis the voice of a syren-'tis false-heed it not!
She sings to destroy thee-there's death in the pot.""

It is to be deeply lamented that such a man as Moore, should employ his gifted imagination in the embellishment of those unhallowed feelings resulting from this depraved appetite. Now and then his muse strikes upon a theme worthy its loftiest flight; but the very pinnacle of its altitude seems only to have increased its downward velocity, and fitted it to grovel still worse in the low obscenity of vulgar rhyme. As a popular poet, he has not perhaps an equal. While his sacred melodies are charming the ear of a christian audience, his Little's poems are hiccuped by the grog-shop frequenter, and ranted upon the boards