It was impossible to read the work without being convinced that the writer possessed great poetical power and a cultivated imagination, with sufficient knowledge of the principles of his art, and much skill in their application. We feel at once that we are in the power and at the will of a master. Tradition and history give up the dead from their burial-places at his bidding, and they pass before us on the stage in the habit that they lived,' and surrounded by the same scenery and customs. They are evidently veritable persons, having life and motion, and subject to all the skiey influences and all the circumstances of life-the social and the solitary, the polished and the rude; they are cultivated and ignorant, philosophic and superstitious, brave and fearful: wisdom and folly, and idiocy and madness, fanaticism and party-spirit, and all the actual conditions of life, are to him as a nurse's tale and an old wife's fable. But it is equally evident that all these persons and circumstances, with all their attributes, are the shapings of the poet's pen. We shall look for them in vain elsewhere; they are not to be found in tradition or history, or in the common world about us; they had their birth-place and their cradle in the brain of the poet, and are the legitimate progeny of his own creative genius. It is granted that much was derived from external sources; but this is the privilege of a poetical mind, to identify all its acquisitions for its own; its knowledge is alchemized and the base metal comes out from the intellectual crucible in the form of gold, and the ore is purified from the dross. That which was before precious in itself, in proceeding through the mint of his imagination, acquires a different impress; when again made current, the coin bears his image and superscription—and rightly: for of the treasure derived from this intellectual commerce, the most part is defaced and the motto worn out, and it must be melted down again, and stamped anew to be fit for use.-If, when thus given back to us, his descriptions appear as living symbols, or vivid resemblances of persons and things that we were before acquainted with, so much the better-this is the triumph of the poetic art. Thus it was with Shakspeare. But we shall find that they do not strike as copies merely, but with the force and fervour of originals. Like the statue in The Winter's Tale, you would deem they breathed, and that those veins did verily bear blood; the very life seems warm upon their lips; the fixure of their eyes has motion in it; an air comes from them, and the fine chisel has cut breath.'

The poet does not sit down as a limner to a model, in all the drudgery of imitation; his models are in his mind, wherein he discovers a world that is as real in its own way as the world around us. True poetic genius reflects nature by a plastic opera

tion, analogous in all respects to the processes of nature herselfin the same manner as the vital sap of the tree is nourished by the shower and the dew, but puts forth bud and blossom; thus converting all outward influences to its own ends, by the activity of inherent vigour. It is in this that Fielding's personages are distinguished from Smollett's. The poetry of Fielding is as a gum which oozes from whence 'tis nourished;' and thus the actions and manners of his characters proceed rather out of their peculiar dispositions, than from accidental impulses; and the characters themselves are, in a similar manner, produced voluntarily and freely from the mere fertility of his fancy

Smollett, on the contrary, individualizes his characters by the peculiarities of their situation, their personal appearance, or their habitual eccentricities; with him,

The fire i'the flint

Shows not, till it be struck.'

And, we think, similar differences are observable between the genius and productions of Cervantes and Le Sage.

There is no small portion of this poetical power, of this ideal creation, in Waverley. Whatever there is of acquired knowledge, and there is a great deal, is reproduced in another form, differently organized for a peculiar purpose, as (to revert to our former illustration) the tree reproduces the dew and the shower in spontaneous foliage and blossom. And freely as the tree expands her branches, and multiplies her leaves, has the author of Waverley continued to produce with a fertility apparently inexhaustible. Neither are we wearied with his repeated appearance, nor satiated with his abundance, any more than with the tree for opening its leaf every spring, or bearing its fruit every autumn.But let no one vainly imagine that, whatever his genius may be, he can, without long preparation and profound study, produce works like these. The mind must be nourished and enriched with the appropriate aliment, and disciplined by patient exercise and practice, before it can possibly attain to the tenth part of an hair of excellence like his-still less can a writer of little genius hope to succeed as his rival or imitator. There are writers of some talent, though not very elevated either in kind or degree, who seem to think that to imitate the construction of his fable, to collect some scraps of antiquarian lore, and to introduce old names at intervals, is to write a novel in the style of Waverley. It is an error, and a fatal one.

The

The inferiority of this author's latter novels, compared with the earlier, seems principally to consist in a certain baldness of plot, incident, and character. It has been with him as with fiction itself, in the several stages of its history. In the earlier stages, there was an exuberance of action and of manners. The old romances are full of the most astonishing occurrences, following each other in rapid succession, produced by the agency of a crowd of persons, and sometimes the intervention of supernatural beings. In time, a principle of selection obtains; and the feelings are touched, and interest sufficiently excited, by the skilful developement of a few well-chosen incidents and characters. In the subsequent stages of its progress, their number is still further diminished, and the intervals are filled up with speculation on motive, and description of scenery; with sentiment and eloquence, and philosophical solution. This course is advantageous with regard to fiction in general; yet, though a necessary consequence of writing much, is not so conducive to the interest of an individual author's later productions; and the reason of the difference is easily explained. Fiction at large has no boundaries but those of time and space; the fiction of an indi vidual genius, however splendid, must have very different limits.

The truth of what we have been saying might be well illustrated by a comparison between the earliest of the Scotch Novels and one of the latest. Waverley is produced from the outpourings of the writer's mind. From the fulness of his heart his mouth speaketh.' The familiar and romantic, the

gay and the grave, are blended and harmonized with peculiar grace and vigour. He seems impatient for opportunity to sparkle -to be witty-to relieve his teeming fancy of its inventions, and his understanding of its stores of fiction and story, accumulated for the matter and embellishment of his narrative. The Spirit of Poetry is breathing all about, and glancing upon it, in the happiest lights and the most amiable aspects. There is an instance of prodigality, arising from a confidence in superabundant resources, in Mrs. Rachael's tale of Poor William,' and of Lucy St. Aubin, who lived and died a maid for his sake, and who, when she found herself sinking, desired to be brought to Waverley Honour once more, and visited all the places where she had been with my grand uncle, and caused the carpets to be raised, that she might trace the impression of his blood, and if tears could have washed it out, it had not been there now; for there was not a dry eye in the house!' Then follows a fine effusion of poetry and feeling: You would have thought, Edward, that the very trees mourned for her, for their leaves dropped around her without a gust of wind; and indeed she

looked

looked like one that would never see them green again.' The writer who could afford this expense of feeling and fancy upon such an occasion, must have felt satisfied of the sufficiency of his resources;—and that he did not vainly presume on their extent, what he was able to do in the subsequent portions of that work, and in those that immediately succeeded, abundantly testified.

Redgauntlet is an inferior kind of Waverley. It has little of the romantic, and less of the historical merit. The heir of the Stuarts is again introduced, but in the winter of his fortune, and in the vale of years. The uncle of the hero is another Fergus M'Ivor his sister, a feeble Flora-Peter Peebles is as vigorous a sketch as the Baron of Bradwardine; they are both descriptive of intellectual aberrations, in different ways;-Callum Beg is the elder brother of Little Benjie. The inferior characters have their counterparts in that earlier production; perhaps Joshua Geddes, the Quaker, is sui generis; but for Wandering Willie, and the senior Fairford-are they not of the same class as Davie Gellatly and the Baillie M'Wheeble?-In the progress of the plot, and the grouping of the characters, there are also resemblances and coincidences. Both heroes are abstracted in a state of insensibility, for the purpose of being attached, by interested parties, to the cause of the Prince; and the scene in the farm-house, where the second hero is attended upon by one Dorcas or Cicely, is very similar to that in the hut, where Rose Bradwardine flits about the bed of the first during his convalescence. Both are presented to the Chevalier, whose cause is in each instance unsuccessful; but here the coincidence is in the historical fact, not in the novelist's fiction.

But we must not be misunderstood. In the plot and construction of Redgauntlet, however comparatively defective, the hand of a superior artist is constantly apparent. The epistolary opening is written in a superior style to the subsequent parts of the book. The form adopted is decidedly poetical; composed of episodes, but not of the sort condemned by Aristotle, if we except those of Wanty Ewart and Peter Peebles, which are connected slightly, yet so judiciously, as to deepen the shades of the litigant's character, whom no term or degree of endurance and misery, suffered in his own person, can discipline to sympathy or repentance for the ruin inflicted by himself on the widow and the fatherless, that might be justified by legal form and judicial process. In the uniformity of the story, there are differences-in the identity of the characters, there are distinctions. It has been usual to speak of the latter as mere duplicates, one of the other; but this is incorrect. They are of the same class, not the same individuals.

The

The invention of the author is still exercised; and the greatest masters of their art have preferred the representation of the individual to the species. Shakspeare's characters are not all of different classes—many are individuals of the same. His classes may be more numerous than those of the Scottish Novelist, but that is a question in which we are not at present paramountly interested in, and which would at any rate lead us into much too wide a field of discussion.

Aristotle contends for the construction of the fable, and the combination of the incidents, as the principal parts of tragic composition; but justly observes, that the first attempts of dramatic writing rather excel in the language and manners; and a modern writer, whose poetical genius is not less elevated than his philosophical reason is profound, from a critical analysis of the two earliest works of Shakspeare- Venus and Adonis' and Lucrece,'has abstracted the following marks, as indicative of extraordinary poetic power-1. The perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject, and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant; 2. the choice of a subject remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself; 3. the power to modify images copied from nature by a predominant passion, or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; and, 4. depth and energy of thought. In the succeeding productions of our great poet, 'the creative power and the intellectual energy,' says the same writer, wrestle as in a war-embrace. At length in his drama they were reconciled, and fought, each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that at their first meeting, within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice.'

In the more matured works of individual genius, strength is frequently substituted for sweetness-the other marks remaining the same, but regulated by a more methodical judgmentwith the addition of fable and action; and, in the first novels of the Waverley series, it was impossible not to recognize the hand of an artist whose genius had already arrived at this characteristic point of excellence. We found there a diction diffuse, not from weakness, but the facility resulting from much practice in composition; not ambitiously ornate, yet not reject

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