hues of life, and without destroying its native colouring, give to it a more solemn tinge. But we cannot extend our indulgence to the seer in the Legend of Montrose, or the Lady of Avenel, in the Monastery; where the spirits of another world do not cast their shadowings on this, but stalk forth in open light, and "in form as palpable" as any of the mortal characters. In works of passion, fairies and ghosts can scarcely be "simple products of the common day," without destroying all harmony in our perceptions, and bringing the whole into discredit with the imagination as well as the feelings. Fairy tales are among the most exquisite things in the world, and so are delineations of humanity like those of our author; but they can never be blended without debasing the former into chill substances, or refining the latter into airy nothings.

We shall avoid the fruitless task of dwelling on the defects of this author, or the general insipidity of his lovers, on the want of skill in the development of his plots, on the clumsiness of his prefatory introductions, or the impotence of many of his conclusions. He has done his country and his nature no ordinary service. He has brought romance almost into our own times, and made the nobleness of humanity familiar to our daily thoughts. He has enriched history to us by opening such varied and delicious vistas to our gaze, beneath the range of its loftier events and more public characters. May his intellectual treasury prove exhaustless as the purse of Fortunatus, and may he dip into it unsparingly for the delight and the benefit of his species!

GODWIN.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

moveless grandeur which never could spring from mere fantasy. His works are not like those which a man, who is endued with a deep sense of beauty, or a rare faculty of observation, or a sportive wit, or a breathing eloquence, may fabricate as the "idle business" of his life, as the means of profit or of fame. They have more in them of acts than of writings. They are the living and the immortal deeds of a man who must have been a great political adventurer had he not been an author. There is in "Caleb Williams" alone the material—the real burning energy—which might have animated a hundred schemes for the weal or wo of the species.

MR. GODWIN is the most original-not only | of living novelists-but of living writers in prose. There are, indeed very few authors of any age who are so clearly entitled to the praise of having produced works, the first perusal of which is a signal event in man's internal history. His genius is by far the most extraordinary, which the great shaking of nations and of principles-the French revolution-impelled and directed in its progress. English literature, at the period of that marvellous change, had become sterile; the rich luxuriance which once overspread its surface, had gradually declined into thin and scattered productions of feeble growth and transient duration. The fearful convulsion which No writer of fictions has ever succeeded so agitated the world of politics and of morals, strikingly as Mr. Godwin, with so little adtore up this shallow and exhausted surface- ventitious aid. His works are neither gay disclosed vast treasures which had been con- creatures of the element, nor pictures of excealed for centuries-burst open the secret ternal life-they derive not their charm from springs of imagination and of thought-and the delusions of fancy, or the familiarities of left, instead of the smooth and weary plain, a daily habitude-and are as destitute of the region of deep valleys and of shapeless hills, fascinations of light satire and felicitous deof new cataracts and of awful abysses, of lineation of society, as they are of the magic spots blasted into everlasting barrenness, and of the Arabian Tales. His style has "no regions of deepest and richest soil. Our figures and no fantasies," but is simple and author partook in the first enthusiasms of the austere. Yet his novels have a power which spirit-stirring season-in "its pleasant exer- so enthralls us, that we half doubt, when we cise of hope and joy”—in much of its specu- read them in youth, whether all our experilative extravagance, but in none of its practi-ence is not a dream, and these the only realical excesses. He was roused not into action but into thought; and the high and undying energies of his soul, unwasted on vain efforts for the actual regeneration of man, gathered strength in those pure fields of meditation to which they were limited. The power which might have ruled the disturbed nations with the wildest, directed only to the creation of high theories and of marvellous tales, imparted to its works a stern reality, and a

ties. He lays bare to us the innate might and majesty of man. He takes the simplest and most ordinary emotions of our nature, and makes us feel the springs of delight or of agony which they contain, the stupendous force which lies hid within them, and the sublime mysteries with which they are connected. He exhibits the naked wrestle of the passions in a vast solitude, where no object of material beauty disturbs our attention from the august

spectacle, and where the least beating of the heart is audible in the depth of the stillness. His works endow the abstractions of life with more of real presence, and make us more intensely conscious of existence than any others with which we are acquainted. They give us a new feeling of the capacity of our nature for action or for suffering, make the currents of our blood mantle within us, and our bosoms heave with indistinct desires for the keenest excitements and the strangest perils. We feel as though we could live years in moments of energetic life, while we sympathize with his breathing characters. In things which before appeared indifferent, we discern sources of the fullest delight or of the most intense anguish. The healthful breathings of the common air seem instinct with an unspeakable rapture. The most ordinary habits which link one season of life to another become the awakeners of thoughts and of remembrances "which do often lie too deep for tears." The nicest disturbances of the imagination make the inmost fibres of the being quiver with agonies. Passions which have not usually been thought worthy to agitate the soul, now first seem to have their own ardent beatings, and their tumultuous joys. We seem capable of a more vivid life than we have ever before felt or dreamed of, and scarcely wonder that he who could thus give us a new sense of our own vitality, should have imagined that mind might become omnipotent over matter, and that he was able, by an effort of the will, to become corporeally immortal!

presses us with the immortality of virtue; and while he leaves us painfully to regret the stains which the most gifted and energetic characters contract amidst the pollutions of time, he inspires us with hope that these shall pass away for ever. We drink in unshaken confidence the good and the true, which is ever of more value than hatred or contempt for the evil!

"Caleb Williams," the earliest, is also the most popular of our author's romances, not because his latter works have been less rich in sentiment and passion, but because they are, for the most part, confined to the development of single characters; while in this there is the opposition and death grapple of two beings, each endowed with poignant sensibilities and quenchless energy. There is no work of fiction which more rivets the attention-no tragedy which exhibits a struggle more sublime, or sufferings more intense, than this; yet to produce the effect, no complicated machinery is employed, but the springs of action are few and simple. The motives are at once common and elevated, and are purely intellectual, without appearing for an instant inadequate to their mighty issues. Curiosity, for instance, which generally seems a low and ignoble motive for scrutinizing the secrets of a man's life, here seizes with strange fascination on a gentle and ingenuous spirit, and supplies it with excitement as fervid, and snatches of delight as precious and as fearful, as those feelings create which we are accustomed to regard as alone worthy to enrapture or to agitate. The involuntary recurrence by Williams to the string of phrensy in the soul of one whom he would die to serve-the workings of his tor

confidence from him-and the net thenceforth spread over the path of the youth like an invisible spell by his agonized master, surprising as they are, arise from causes so natural and so adequate, that the imagination at once owns them as authentic. The mild beauty of Falkland's natural character, contrasted with the guilt he has incurred, and his severe purpose to lead a long life of agony and crime, that his fame may be preserved spotless, is affecting almost without example. There is a rude grandeur even in the gigantic oppressor Tyrel, which all his disgusting enormities cannot destroy. In

The intensity of passion which is manifested in the novels of Godwin is of a very different kind from that which burns in the poems of a noble bard, whom he has been sometimes er-tures on the heart of Falkland till they wring roneously supposed to resemble. The former sets before us mightiest realities in clear vision; the latter imbodies the phantoms of a feverish dream. The strength of Godwin is the pure energy of unsophisticated nature; that of Lord Byron is the fury of disease. The grandeur of the last is derived from its transitoriness; that of the first from its eternal essence. The emotion in the poet receives no inconsiderable part of its force from its rebound from the dark rocks and giant barriers which seem to confine its rage within narrow boundaries; the feeling of the novelist is in its own natural current deep and resistless. The per-dependently of the master-spring of interest, sons of the bard feel intensely, because they soon shall feel no more; those of the novelist glow, and kindle, and agonize, because they shall never perish. In the works of both, guilt is often associated with sublime energy; but how dissimilar are the impressions which they leave on the spirit! Lord Byron strangely blends the moral degradation with the intellectual majesty so that goodness appears tame, and crime only is honoured and exalted. Godwin, on the other hand, only teaches us bitterly to mourn the evil which has been cast on a noble nature, and to regard the energy of the character not as inseparably linked with vice, but as destined ultimately to subdue it. He makes us everywhere feel that crime is not the native heritage, but the accident, of the species, of which we are members. He im

there are in this novel individual passages which can never be forgotten. Such are the fearful flight of Emily with her ravisher-the escape of Caleb Williams from prison, and his enthusiastic sensations on the recovery of his freedom, though wounded and almost dying without help-and the scenes of his peril among the robbers. Perhaps this work is the grandest ever constructed out of the simple elements of humanity, without any extrinsic aid from imagination, wit, or memory.

In "St. Leon," Mr. Godwin has sought the stores of the supernatural;-but the "metaphysical aid" which he has condescended to accept is not adapted to carry him farther from nature, but to ensure a more intimate and wide communion with its mysteries. His hero does not acquire the philosopher's stone and the

elixir of immortality to furnish out for himself | hour; but it is ever the peculiar power of Mr a dainty solitude, where he may dwell, soothed Godwin to make us feel that there is something with the music of his own undying thoughts, within us which cannot perish! and rejoicing in his severance from his frail and transitory fellows. Apart from those among whom he moves, his yearnings for sympathy become more intense as it eludes him, and his perceptions of the mortal lot of his species become more vivid and more fond, as he looks on it from an intellectual eminence which is alike unassailable to death and to joy. Even in this work, where the author has to conduct a perpetual miracle, his exceeding earnestness makes it difficult to believe him a fabulist. Listen to his hero, as he expatiates in the first consciousness of his high prerogatives:

"Fleetwood" has less of our author's characteristic energy than any other of his works. The earlier parts of it, indeed, where the formation of the hero's character, in free rovings amidst the wildest of nature's scenery, is traced, have a deep beauty which reminds us of some of the holiest imaginations 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-daywhen, 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.

"I surveyed my limbs, all the joints and articulations of my frame, with curiosity and astonishment. What! exclaimed I, these limbs, this complicated but brittle frame shall last for ever! No disease shall attack it; no pain shall seize it; death shall withhold from it for ever his abhorred grasp! Perpetual vigour, perpetual activity, perpetual youth, shall take up their abode with me! Time shall generate in me no decay, shall not add a wrinkle to my brow, or convert a hair of my head to gray! This body was formed to die; this edifice to crumble into dust; the principles of corruption and mortality are mixed up in every atom of my frame. But for me the laws of nature are suspended, the eternal wheels of the universe roll backward; I am destined to be triumphant over Fate and Time! Months, years, cycles, centuries! To me these are but as indivisible moments. I shall never become old; I shall always be, as it were, in the porch "Mandeville" has all the power of its auand infancy of existence; no lapse of years thor's earliest writings; but its main subjectshall subtract any thing from my future dura- the development of an engrossing and maddention. I was born under Louis the Twelfth; ing hatred-is not one which can excite the life of Francis the First now threatens a human sympathy. There is, however, a bright speedy termination; he will be gathered to his relief to the gloom of the picture, in the angelic fathers, and Henry, his son, will succeed him. disposition of Clifford, and the sparkling loveBut what are princes, and kings, and genera- liness of Henrietta, who appears "full of life, tions of men to me! I shall become familiar and splendour, and joy." All Mr. Godwin's with the rise and fall of empires; in a little female heroines have a certain airiness and while the very name of France, my country, radiance-a visionary grace, peculiar to them, will perish from off the face of the earth, and which may at first surprise by their contrast men will dispute about the situation of Paris, to the robustness of his masculine creations. as they dispute about the site of ancient Nine-But it will perhaps be found that the more deeply veh, and Babylon, and Troy. Yet I shall still be young. I shall take my most distant posterity by the hand; I shall accompany them in their career; and, when they are worn out and exhausted, shall shut up the tomb over them, and set forward."

This is a strange tale, but it tells like a true one! When we first read it, it seemed as though it had itself the power of alchemy to steal into our veins, and render us capable of resisting death and age. For a short-too short! a space, all time seemed open to our personal view-we felt no longer as of yesterday; but the grandest parts of our knowledge of the past seemed mightiest recollections of a far-off childhood.

man is conversant with the energies of his own heart, the more will he seek for opposite qualities in woman.

His

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. "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 This was the happy extravagance of an mild and cheerful faith in the progressive ad

"The wars we too remembered of King Nine, And old Assaracus, and Ibycus divine."

ness 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

vances 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 a long interval, Mr. Godwin has announced a reply to this popular systema system which reduces man to an animal, governed by blind instinct, and destitute of rea-mild light of those peaceful years, which he son, 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 wit

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.]

twine with the heart-strings, 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 passionswhere 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 immovable 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 thoughtwhich add to its ungenial influence, and may be traced to the same causes.

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, checkered 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 Spenser, or of Wordsworth-whose farreaching 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 tracks which their genius reveals to us as safely and If we were disposed to refer these defects to with as sure and fond a tread as along the one general source, we should attribute them broad highway of the world. When the re-to the want of an imagination proportionate to gions which they set before us are the most sensibility and to mastery of language in the distant from our ordinary perceptions, we yet writer's mind, or to his comparative neglect of at home in them, their wonders are that most divine of human faculties. It is edistrangely familiar to us, and the scene, over-fying to observe how completely the nature of spread with a consecrating and lovely lustre, this power is mistaken by many who profess breaks on us, not as a wild fantastic novelty, to decide on matters of taste. They regard it but as a revived recollection of some holier as something wild and irregular, the reverse life, which the soul rejoices thus delightfully to recognise.

seem

Not thus do the works of Mr. Maturin-original and surprising as they often are-affect us. They have no fibres in them which en

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 discourses of Dr. and moral beauty-that imagination really puts Chalmers, because they deal so largely in in- forth its divine energies. We do not charge finite obscurities that there is no room for a on Mr. Maturin that he is destitute of power single image-and in the poems of Lord Byron, to do this, or that he does not sometimes direct because his characters are so unlike all beings it to its purest uses. But his sensibility is so which have ever existed. Far otherwise thought much more quick and subtle than his authority Spencer when he represented the laurel as the over his impressions is complete; the flow of meed-not of poets insane-but "of poets his words so much more copious and facile SAGE." True imagination is, indeed, the deep than the throng of images on his mind; that eye of the profoundest wisdom. It is opposed he too often confounds us with unnumbered to reason, not in its results, but in its process; snatches and imperfect gleams of beauty, or it does not demonstrate truth only because it astonishes us by an outpouring of eloquent sees it. There are vast and eternal realities bombast, instead of enriching our souls with in our nature, which reason proves to exist distinct and vivid conceptions. Like many which sensibility "feels after and finds"-and other writers of the present time-especially which imagination beholds in clear and solemn of his own country-he does not wait until vision, and pictures with a force and vividness the stream which young enthusiasm sets loose which assures their existence even to ungifted shall work itself clear, and calmly reflect the mortals. Its subjects are the true, the univer-highest heavens. His creations bear any sal, 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. A mirror can 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 imbodied 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!

stamp but that of truth and soberness. He sees the glories of the external world, and the mightier wonders of man's moral and intellectual nature, with a quick sense, and feels them with an exquisite sympathy-but he gazes on them in "very drunkenness of heart," and becomes giddy with his own indistinct emotions, till all things seem confounded in a gay bacchanalian dance, and assume strange fantastic combinations; which, when transferred to his works, startle for a moment, but do not produce that "sober certainty of waking bliss" which real imagination assures. There are two qualities necessary to form a truly imaginative writer-a quicker and an intenser feeling than ordinary men possess for the beautiful and the sublime, and the calm and meditative power of regulating, combining, and arranging its own impressions, and of distinctly bodying forth the final results of this harmonizing process. Where the first of these properties exists, the last is, perhaps, attainable by that deep and careful study which is more necessary to a poet than to any artist who works in mere earthly materials. But this study many of the most gifted of modern writers unhappily disdain; and if mere sale and popularity are their objects, they are right; for, in the multitude, the wild, the disjointed, the incoherent, and the paradoxical, which are but for a moment, necessarily awaken more immediate sensation than the pure and harmonious, which are destined to last while nature and the soul shall endure.

It is easy to perceive how it is that the imThus the products of genuine imagination perfect creations of men of sensibility and of are "all compact." It is, indeed, only the eloquence strike and dazzle more at the first, compactness and harmony of its pictures than the completest works of truly imaginative which give to it its name or its value. To poets. A perfect statue-a temple fashioned discover that there are mighty elements in with exactest art-appear less, at a mere humanity to observe that there are bright glance, from the nicety of their proportions. hues and graceful forms in the external world The vast majority of readers, in an age like -and to know the fitting names of these-is ours, have neither leisure nor taste to seek and all which is required to furnish out a rich stock ponder over the effusions of holiest genius. of spurious imagination to one who aspires to They must be awakened into admiration by the claim of a wild and irregular genius. For something new and strange and surprising; him a dictionary is a sufficient guide to Par- and the more remote from their daily thoughts nassus. It is only by representing those in- and habits-the more fantastical and daringtellectual elements in their finest harmony-by the effort, the more will it please, because the combining those hues and forms in the fairest more it will rouse them. Thus a man who pictures-or by making the glorious combina- will exhibit some impossible combination of tions of external things the symbols of truth | heroism and meanness-of virtue and of vice