6

most extraordinary monuments of splendid imagery and caustic wit which literature can afford. It is very short, and in some respects resembles (at least in its cold sarcasm of tone and exquisite refinement of style) the 'Zadig' of Voltaire. But 'Vathek' is immeasurably superior in point of imagination, and in its singular fidelity to the Oriental colouring and costume. Indeed, if we set aside its contemptuous and sneering tone, it might pass for a translation of one of The Thousand and one Nights. It narrates the adventures of a haughty and effeminate monarch, led on, by the temptations of a malignant genie and the sophistries of a cruel and ambitious mother, to commit all sorts of crimes, to abjure his faith, and to offer allegiance to Eblis, the Mahommedan Satan, in the hope of seating himself on the throne of the Preadamite sultans. The gradual development in his mind of sensuality, cruelty, atheism, and insane and Titanic ambition, is very finely traced; the imagery throughout is truly splendid, its Eastern gorgeousness tempered and relieved by the sneering sarcastic irony of a French Encyclpédiste ; and the concluding scene soars into the highest atmosphere of grand descriptive poety. Here he descends into the subterranean palace of Eblis, where he does homage to the Evil One, and wanders for a while among the superhuman splendours of those regions of punish ment. The fancy of genius has seldom conceived anything more terrible than "the vast multitude, incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their heart, without once regarding any thing around them. They all avoided each other, and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random, unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert where no foot had trodden."

His

Hope, like Beckford, was a man of refined taste, luxurious habits, and possessed of a colossal fortune accumulated in commerce. work, though very different in form from that of Beckford, was not unlike it in some points. 'Anastasius,' published in 1819, purports to be the autobiography of a Greek, who, to escape the consequences of his own crimes and villanies of every kind, becomes a renegade, and passes through a long series of the most extraordinary and romantic vicissitudes. The hero is a compound of almost all the vices of his unfortunate and degraded nation; and in his vicissitudes of fortune we see passing before us, as in a diorama, the whole social, political, and religious life of Turkey and the Morea. The style is elaborate and passionate; and this, as well as the character of the principal personage,

"Link'd with one virtue, and a thousand crimes,

reminds us, in reading 'Anastasius,' very strongly of the manner of Lord Byron. Indeed, this romance is very much what Byron would have written in prose-the same splendid, vivid, and ever

fresh pictures of the external nature of the most beautiful and interesting region of the world, the same intensity of passion, the same gloomy colouring of unrepenting crime.

But if the darker side of Oriental nature be presented to us in 'Vathek' and 'Anastasius,' in the former combined with the caustic irony of Voltaire, in the second with the mournful grandeur of Byron, the 'Hajji Baba' of Morier will make us ample amends in drollery and a truly comic verve. This is the 'Gil Blas' of Oriental life. Hajji Baba is a barber of Ispahan, who passes through a long but delightfully varied series of adventures, such as happen in the despotic and simple governments of the East, where the pipe-bearer of one day may become the vizier of the next. The hero is an easy, merry good-for-nothing, whose dexterity and gaiety it is impossible not to admire, even while we rejoice in the punishment which his manifold rascalities drawn down upon him; and perhaps there is no work in the world which gives so vast, so lively, and so accurate a picture of every grade, every phase of Oriental existence. Mr. Morier, who resided nearly all his life in various parts of the East, and whose long sojourn as British minister in Persia made him profoundly acquainted with the character of the people of that country, has most inimitably sustained his imaginary personage. The Hajji is not only a thorough Oriental, but intensely Persian, and a Persian of the lower class into the bargain; a perfect specimen of his nation the French of the East- -gay, talkative, dexterous, vain, enterprising, acute, not over scrupulous, but always amusing. The worthy Hajji, in the continuation of the story, comes to England in the suite of an embassy from "the asylum of the universe;" and perhaps nothing was ever more truly natural and comic than the way in which he relates his impressions and adventures in this country, his surprise at the condition of women among us, his admiration of the " moonfaces," and, above all, his astonished wonder at the "Coompany," the great enigma to all Orientals.

--

It now remains only to speak of one species of prose fiction-that which has for its subject the manners and personages of marine or military life. It may easily be conceived that, the former service being most entwined with all the sympathies of the national heart, the subdivision of marine novels should be the richest. The contrary might be naturally expected in France; and in France we accordingly find that though, particularly in modern times, numerous novelists have endeavoured to put in a picturesque and attractive light the manners and scenes of a sea-life, yet that it is the army which has supplied popular literature-the novel, the chanson, and the vaude. ville with the types of character most identified with the national feeling and predilection. What the militaire is to the French public, the sailor is to the English: in the songs of the people, on their stage, in their favourite books, the "Jack Tar," the "old Aga

memnon" who followed Nelson to the Nile, is as perpetually recurring and indispensable a personage as the "vieux moustache," the grogneur de la vieille garde," to the French. And this is natural enough. Each country is peculiarly proud of that class to which it owes its brightest and least disputable glory: as the Frenchman naturally hugs himself in the idea that France is incontestably the first military nation in the world, so the Englishman, no less naturally is peculiarly vain of his country's naval achievements; not that in either case the former at all forgets or undervalues the naval triumphs of his flag, or the latter the military exploits of his; but simply because France is not essentially maritime, and England is, and therefore the natives of each attach themselves to that species of glory which they consider the peculiar property of their nation.

At the head of our marine novelists stands Captain Marryat, one of the most easy, lively, and truly humorous story-tellers we possess. One of the chief elements of his talent is undoubtedly the tone of high, effervescent, irrepressible animal spirits which characterises. everything he has written. He seems as if he sate down to compose without having formed the least idea of what he is going to say, and sentence after sentence seems to flow from his pen without thought, without labour, and without hesitation. He seems half tipsy with the very gaiety of his heart, and never scruples to introduce the most grotesque extravagances of character, language, and event, provided they are likely to excite a laugh. This would produce absurdity and failure as often as laughter, were it not that he has a natural lact and judgment in the ludicrous; and this happy audacity

this hit-or-miss boldness- serves him admirably well. Nothing can surpass the liveliness and drollery of his 'Peter Simple,' 'Jacob Faithful,' or 'Mr. Midshipman Easy;' what an inexhaustible gallery of originals has he paraded before us! The English national temperament has a peculiar tendency to produce eccentricity of manner, and a sea-life in particular seems calculated to foster these oddities till they burst into full blow and luxuriance. Marryat's narratives are exceedingly inartificial, and often grossly improbable; but we read on with gay delight, never thinking of the story, but only solicitous to follow the droll adventures, and laugh at the still droller characters. Smollett himself has nothing richer than Captain Kearney, with his lies and innocent ostentation; Captain To, with his passion for pig, his lean wife and her piano; or than Mr. Easy fighting his ship under a green petticoat for want of an ensign. This author has also a peculiar talent for the delineation of boyish characters his Faithful and Peter Simple (the "fool of the family") not only amuse but interest us; and in many passages he has shown no mean mastery over the pathetic emotions. Though superficial in his view of character, he is generally faithful to reality, and shows an extensive if not very deep knowledge of what his old waterman

calls "human natur." There are few authors more amusing thau Marryat; his books have the effervescence of champagne.

Captains Glasscock and Chamier, Mr. Howard and Mr. Trelawney, have also produced naval fictions of merit; the two last authors have followed a more tragic path than the others mentioned above, and have written passages of great power and impressiveness; but their works are injured by a too frequent occurrence of exaggerated pictures of blood and horror- a fatal fault, from which they might have been warned by the example of Eugène Sue.

The tales called 'Tom Cringle's Log' and 'The Cruize of the Midge' are also works in this kind (though not exclusively naval) of striking brilliancy and imaginative power. In these we have a most gorgeously coloured and faithful delineation of the luxuriant scenery of the West Indian Archipelago, and the manners of the creole and colonist population are reproduced with consummate drollery and inexhaustible splendour of language. They were the production of Mr. Scott, a gentleman engaged in commerce, and personally familiar with the scenes he described; and the admiration they excited at their first appearance (anonymously) in 'Blackwood's Magazine' caused them to be ascribed to the pen of some of the most distinguished of living writers, particularly to that of John Wilson, the editor of the journal.

war

Of the military novels we have but a few words to say they are generally inferior to the same class of works in France. Mr. Gleig has recorded in a narrative form many striking episodes of that " of giants" whose most glorious and terrific scenes were the lines of Torres Vedras, the storm of Badajoz, and the field of Waterloo; and a number of younger authors, chiefly Irishmen, as Messrs. Lever and Lover, have detailed with their national vivacity the grotesque oddities and gay bravery of their countrymen, who never appear to so much advantage as on the field of battle.

CHAPTER XX.

THE STAGE AND JOURNALISM.

Comedy in England Congreve, Farquhar, &c. Sheridan-The Modern Romantic Drama-Oratory in England: Burke-Letters of Junius-Modern Theologians: Paley and Butler-Blackstone-Adam Smith-Metaphysics: Stewart Bentham - Periodicals: the Newspaper, the Magazine, and the Review The Quarterly, and Blackwood - The Edinburgh, and the New Monthly-The Westminster-Cheap Periodical Literature.

COMEDY is essentially the expression not of Life, but of Society. It does not deal with the passions, but with the affectations and follies of our nature: it belongs, therefore, particularly to a highly civilized and artificial state of existence. Many of Shakspeare's most humorous creations are comic in the highest degree, but they are not in any sense comedies: they are something infinitely more elevated, more profound, more far-reaching; but they are not comedies. Exquisitely humorous as they are, the humor is not in them the primary element, the unmixed subject-matter of these inimitable delineations; it is united with tenderness, romantic passion, exhaustless poetic fancy; and therefore we call them Plays. Indeed, it may almost be maintained that humour is not the true element of comedy at all—that is, of comedy properly so named. Wit is the essence, the life-blood of comedy, and wit is as different from humour as from tragic passion. Wit is the negative, the destructive process-humour the positive, the reconstructive. Wit is an analytic, humour a synthetic operation. The latter indeed is so demonstrably a higher power of the mind, that it includes the former, but with the addition of something more, and something, too, infinitely higher in its source and nature. The humorist must possess wit; but he must also possess tenderness, sympathy, love. In the language of algebra we may formulise it thus wit sympathy humour. And in proportion as the affec: + = tions are an endowment of our nature far more elevated than the mere activity of our comparative or perceptive faculties (in the unusual delicacy and sensibility of which consists that power we call wit), in exactly the same measure is humour superior to wit. may be proud to remember that humour is the distinguishing feature of the English national intellect, and the peculiar stamp of individuality which marks our literature. This circumstance alone would suffice to account for the undeniable superiority of our national literature over that of all other civilized countries, in every point— of depth, of grandeur, of variety, of indestructible vitality.

=

We