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tions 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-day—when, 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."

"Mandeville" has all the power of its author's earliest writings; but its main subject-the development of an engrossing and maddening hatred is not one which can excite human sympathy. There is, however, a bright relief to the gloom of the picture, in the angelic disposition of Clifford, and the sparkling loveliness of Henrietta, who appears "full of life, 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.

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. His "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 mild and cheerful faith in the progressive advances and the final perfection of the species. 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 long interval, Mr. Godwin has announced a reply to this popular system-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 witness 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, and which were not given to the species in 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.]

THE author of Montorio and of Bertram is 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, chequered 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 Spencer, or of Wordsworth-whose far-reaching 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 tracts which their genius reveals to us as safely and with as sure and fond a tread as along the broad highway of the world. When the regions which they set before us are the most distant from our ordinary perceptions, we yet seem at home in them, their wonders are strangely familiar to us, and the scene, overspread 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 entwine with the heartstrings, and which keep 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 passions— where 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 immoveable 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 thought-which add to its ungenial influence, and may be traced to the same causes.

If we were disposed to refer these defects to one general source, we should attribute them to the want of an imagination proportionate to sensibility and to mastery of language in the writer's mind, or to his comparative neglect of that most divine of human faculties. It is edifying to observe how completely the nature of 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 discources of Dr. Chalmers, because they deal so largely in infinite obscurities that there is no room for a single image-and in the poems of Lord Byron, because his characters are so unlike all beings which have ever existed. Far otherwise thought Spencer when he represented the laurel as the meed-not of poets insane-but "of poets SAGE." True imagination is, indeed, the deep eye of the profoundest wisdom. It is opposed to reason, not in its results, but in its process; it does not demonstrate truth only because it sees it. There are vast and eternal realities in our nature, which reason proves to exist—which sensibility "feels after and finds"—and which imagination beholds in clear and solemn vision, and pictures with a force and vividness which assures their existence even to ungifted mortals. Its subjects are the true, the universal, and the lasting. Its distinguishing property has no relation to dimness, or indistinctness, or dazzling radiance, or turbulent confusedness, but is the power of setting all things in the clearest light, and bringing them into perfect harmony. Like the telescope it does not only magnify celestial objects, but brings them nearer to us. Of all the faculties it is the severest and the most unerring. Reason may beguile with splendid sophistry; sensibility may fatally misguide; but if imagination exists at all, it must exhibit only the real. no more reflect an object which is not before it, than the imagination can show the false and the baseless. By revealing to us its results in the language of imagery, it gives to them almost the evidence of the senses. If the analogy between an idea and its physical exponent is not complete, there is no effort of imagination—if it is, the truth is seen, and felt, and enjoyed, like the colours and forms of the material universe. And this effect is produced not only with the greatest possible certainty, but in the fewest possible words. Yet even when this is done-when the illustration is not only the most enchanting, but the most convincing, of proofs-the writer is too often contemptuously depreciated as flowery, by the advocates of mere reason. Strange chance! that he who has embodied truth in a living image, and thus rendered it visible to the intellectual perceptions, should be confounded with those who conceal all sense and meaning beneath mere verbiage and fragments of disjointed metaphor!

A mirror can

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