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"It is enough for my purpose to assert its existence and prevalency, which will scarcely be disputed by those who remember it. It is absurd to depreciate this passion, and deride its influence. It is not the weak and trivial impulse of the nursery, to be forgotten and scorned by manhood. It is the aspiration of a spirit; it is the passion of immortals,' that dread and desire of their final habitations."-Pref. pp. 4 & 5.

We grant there is much truth in this proposition taken generally. But the finest and deepest feelings are those which are most easily exhausted. The chord which vibrates and sounds at a touch, remains in silent tension under continued pressure. Besides, terror, as Bob Acres says of its counterpart, courage, will come and go; and few people can afford timidity enough for the writer's purpose who is determined on "horrifying" them through three thick volumes. The vivacity of the emotion also depends greatly upon surprise, and surprise cannot be repeatedly excited during the perusal of the same work. It is said respecting the cruel punishment of breaking alive upon the wheel, the sufferer's nerves are so much jarred by the first blow, that he feels comparatively little pain from those which follow. There is something of this in moral feeling; nor do we see a better remedy for it than to recommend the cessation of these experiments upon the public, until their sensibility shall have recovered its original tone. The taste for the marvellous has been indeed compared to the habit of drinking ardent liquors. But it fortunately differs in having its limits: he upon whom one dram does not produce the effect, can attain the desired degree of inebriation by doubling the dose. But when we have ceased to start at one ghost, we are callous to the exhibition of a whole Pandemonium. In short, the sensation is generally as transient at it is powerful, and commonly depends upon some slight circumstances which cannot be repeated.

"The time has been, our senses would have cool'd

To hear a night-shriek; and our fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir

As life were in't. We have supped full with horrors;
And direness, now familiar to our thoughts,

Cannot once start us.

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[Macbeth, act v. sc. 5.]

These appear to us the greatest disadvantages under which any author must at present struggle, who chooses supernatural terror for his engines of moving the passions. We dare not call them insurmountable, for how shall we dare to limit the efforts of genius, or shut against its possessor any avenue to the human heart or its passions? Mr Murphy himself, for aught we know, may be destined to show us the prudence of this qualification. He possesses a strong and vigorous fancy, with great command of language. He has indeed regulated his incidents upon those of others, and therefore added to the imperfections which we have pointed out, the want of originality. But his feeling and conception of character are his own, and from these we judge of his powers. In truth, we rose from his strange chaotic novel romance as from a confused and feverish dream, unrefreshed

VI.

19

and unamused, yet strongly impressed by many of the ideas which had been so vaguely and wildly presented to our imagination.

It remains to notice the pieces of poetry scattered through these volumes, many of which claim our attention; but we cannot stop to criticise them. There is a wild and desultory elegy, vol. ii. pp. 305-309, which, though not always strictly metrical, has passages of great pathos, as well as fancy. If the author of it be indeed, as he describes himself, young and inexperienced, without literary friend or counsellor, we earnestly exhort him to seek one on whose taste and judgment he can rely. He is now like an untutored colt, wasting his best vigour in irregular efforts, without either grace or object; but there is much in these volumes which promises a career that may at some future time astonish the public.

ARTICLE VII.

WOMEN; OR, POUR ET CONTRE.

[Women; or, Pour et Contre: A Tale. By the Author of BERTRAM, &c. From the Edinburgh Review, June, ISI8.]

THE author of a successful tragedy has, in the general decay of the dramatic art which marks our age, a good right to assume that distinction in his titlepage, and claim the attention due to superior and acknowledged talent. The faults of "Bertram" are those of an ardent and inexperienced author; but its beauties are undeniably of a high order; and the dramatist who has been successful in exciting pity and terror in audiences assembled to gape and stare at shows and processions, rather than to weep or tremble at the convulsions of human passion, has a title to the early and respectful attention of the critic.

Mr Maturin, the acknowledged author of Bertram, a tragedy, is a clergyman on the Irish establishment, employed chiefly, if we mistake not, in the honourable task of assisting young persons during their classical studies in Trinity College, Dublin. He has been already a wanderer in the field of fiction, and is the author of the "House of Montorio," a romance in the style of Mrs Radcliffe, the "Wild Irish Boy," and other tales.* The present work is framed

* [The Rev. Charles Robert Maturin, curate of St Peter's, Dublin, an eccentric character, but a man of genius, shared the usual fate of irregular and incoherent genius, in a

upon a different and more interesting model, pretending to the merit of describing the emotions of the human heart, rather than that of astonishing the reader by the accumulation of imaginary horrors, or the singular combinations of marvellous and perilous adventures. Accordingly, we think we can perceive marks of greater care than Mr Maturin has taken the trouble to bestow upon his former works of fiction; and that which is a favourite with the author himself, is certainly most likely to become so with the public and with the critic. Upon his former works, the author has in his preface, passed the following severe sentence.

"None of my former prose works have been popular. The strongest proof of which is, none of them arrived at a second edition; hor could I dispose of the copyright of any but of the Milesian, which was sold to Mr Colburn for L.80, in the year 1811.

"Montorio (misnomed by the bookseller The Fatal Revenge, a very bookselling appellation) had some share of popularity, but it was only the popularity of circulating libraries: it deserved no better; the date of that style of writing was out when I was a boy, and I had not powers to revive it. When I look over those books now, I am not at all surprised at their failure; for, independent of their want of external interest (the strongest interest that books can have, even in this reading age), they seem to me to want reality, yraisemblance; the characters, situations, and language are drawn merely from imagina tion; my limited acquaintance with life denied me any other resource. In the tale which I now offer to the public, perhaps there may be recognised some characters which experience will not disown. Some resemblance to common life may be traced in them. On this I rest for the most part the interest of the narrative. The paucity of characters and incidents (the absence of all that constitutes the interest of fictitious biography in general) excludes the hope of this work possessing any other interest."

The preface concludes with an assurance, that the author will never trespass again in this kind;-a promise or threat which is as often made and as often broken as lovers' vows, and which the reader has no reason to desire should in the present case be more scrupulously adhered to, than by other authors of ancient and modern celebrity. Let us only see, what the work really deserves, a favourable reception from the public; and we trust Mr Maturin may be moved once more to resume a species of composition so easy to a writer of rich fancy and ready powers, so delightful to the numerous class of readers, who have Gray's authority for supposing it no bad emblem of paradise to lie all day on a couch and read new novels.

In analyzing "Women," we are tempted to hesitate which end of the tale we should begin with. It is the business of the author to wrap up his narrative in mystery during its progress, to withdraw the veil from his mystery with caution, and inch as it were by inch, and to protract as long as possible the trying crisis "when any reader of common sagacity may foresee the inevitable conclusion;" a period after which neither interest of dialogue nor splendour of description, neither marriage dresses, nor settlement of estates, can protract the

tober, 1824. Besides the present and preceding articles of review, Mr Maturin published tales, called, "The Milesian Chief," 4 vols. ; "The Wild Irish Boy," 3 vols ; "Melmoth the Wanderer." 4 vols.; and "The Albigenses," 4 vols; two Tragedies-" Bertram,” and "Manuel;""The Universe, a Poem;" and two volumes of sermons Among other fantastic humours of this gentleman, it is said that when he wished his family to be aware that

attention of the thorough-bred novel reader. The critic has an interest the very reverse of this. It is his business to make all things brief and plain to the most ordinary comprehension. He is a matter-of-fact sort of a person, who, studious only to be brief and intelligible, commences with the commencement, according to the instructions of the giant Moulineau, "que tous ces récits qui commencent par le milieu ne font qu'embrouiller l'imagination." It is very true that in thus exercising our privilege, the author has something to complain of. We turn his wit the seamy side without, explain all his machinery, and the principles on which it moves before he causes it to play; and, like the persecution which the petty jealousy of his great neighbours at Hagley exercised on poor Shenstone, it seems as if we perversely conducted our readers to inconvenient points of view, and introduced them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception. Of such injuries, according to Johnson, the bard of the Leasowes was wont to complain heavily; and perhaps Mr Maturin may be equally offended with us for placing the conclusion of his book a tthe beginning of our recital. But "let the stricken deer go weep; "-the cook would have more than enough to do, who thought it necessary to consult the eel at which extremity he would like the flaying to begin.

There was then once upon a time, in a remote province of Ireland, a certain man of wealth and wickedness, who combined the theory of infidelity with the practice of the most unbounded libertinism By one of his mistresses, a female of a wild and enthusiastic character, who, though she had sacrificed her virtue, retained the most bigoted attachment to the Catholic religion, this person had a beautiful and gifted daughter. The unfortunate mother, sensible of the dangers which the child must incur under the paternal roof, was detected in an attempt to remove it elsewhere, and driven by violence from the house of her paramour; not, however, before she had poured upon him and his innocent offspring, a curse the most solemn, bitter and wild that ever passed the lips of a human being. The daughter was bred up in the midst of luxury, and sedulously instructed in all that could improve an excellent understanding, by teachers of every language, and masters of every art. At the early age of fifteen, her chief instructor was an artful and accomplished Italian, who abused his trust, and seduced his pupil into a private marriage. A female child was the consequence of this union, and occasioned its being discovered. The father was inexorable, and drove the daughter from his presence; while the sordid husband, disappointed in his avaricious views, tore the child from the mother, returned it upon the hands of his relentless patron, carried off his wife to Italy; and turned to profit her brilliant talents of every kind, as an actress upon the public stage, where she became the most distinguished per

rather tyrant, by whose instructions she had been taught to attain this eminence, died at length, when she had obtained the zenith of her reputation, and left Zaira under the assumed title of Madame Dalmatiani, mistress of her own destiny.

About this period her daughter had attained the age of fifteen years. The infidel grandfather had put her, while an infant, under the charge of an excellent woman, the wife of a wealthy banker. Both professed evangelical doctrines, or what is technically called Calvinistic Methodism. Eva was bred up in the same tenets, shared their religious, gloomy, and sequestered life, and passed for the niece of Mr and Mrs Wentworth. The grandfather made large remittances, which reconciled the banker to this adoption; the heart of his more amiable wife was won by the beauty and engaging disposition of her youthful ward.

A danger, however, hovered over Eva, from the superstitious and frantic obstinacy of her grandmother, who, as Zaira was beyond her reach, had transferred to Eva the anxious and unhesitating zeal with which she laboured to make acquisition of the souls of her descendants for the benefit of the Catholic Church. Reduced by choice more than necessity to the situation of a wandering beggar, this woman retained, it seems, amid her insanity, the power of laying schemes of violence; and, amongst her rags, possessed the means of carrying them into execution. She contrived forcibly to carry off her grand-daughter Eva, and to place her in a carriage, which was to transport her to an obscure hut in the vicinity of Dublin.

These events compose the underground or basement story of the narrative, to which the author introduces his company last of all, although we have thought proper to show its secret recesses, and the machinery which they contain, before examining the superstructure.

Without a metaphor the novel thus commences. De Courcy, a youth of large property, of talents and of virtue, fair and graceful in person, and cultivated in taste and understanding, but of a disposition at once fickle and susceptible, appears as the hero of the tale. In his seventeenth year, he is about to enter himself a student in Christ-Church College. The breaking down of a carriage had rendered him a pedestrian; and as he made his approach to the capital of Ireland through the shades of a delightful summer night, the chaise passes him, in which ruffians, hired as we have seen by no desperate admirer, as is usual on such occasions, but by her old frantic grandmother, are in the act of transporting Eva into the power of that person. To hear the cry of a female in distress, and to pursue the ravishers, although upon foot, was one and the same thing. An interesting and animated account of the chase is given, rendered more true by the knowledge of the localities exhibited by the author. De

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