the singular aberrations of the mind; but neither the one nor the other class of phenomena, so remote from habitual observation and experience, produce any useful impression on the great body of mankind, and the wonder and astonishment which they excite for a moment, may be succeeded at no distant period by the sentiments of incredulity and disgust, which the Roman poet has expressed towards every exhibition of prodigies,-real as well as fictitious. The fame of the artist, too, who works on such portraits, must necessarily be confined to the spot where his originals are known. In so far as their features and lineaments differ from those of the medium or standard forms of the species, and have been produced rather by the external pressure of local and adventitious circumstances, than by the hand of nature, in the same degree the fidelity of his pencil will cease to be recognized and appreciated, even by his contemporaries in a neighbouring country.

The pleasure we derive from contemplating the opinions and the manners of a former age, is not, however, impaired, but probably much enhanced, by their differing greatly from our own. It is only necessary that they be such as we can trace to their source in the constitution of the human mind, and the circumstances in which it is placed. For this pleasure we are almost exclusively indebted to the novelist. The pages of Fielding and Smollet and the author of Waverley, make us better acquainted with the manners of last century,-and those of Hamilton and Edgeworth with the manners of the lower classes in Scotland and Ireland at present, and leave amore vivid and lasting impression upon the mind than it is possible for the truth of history to effect. Such descriptions of individual character, and domestic scenes of the gradations of rank, fortune, education-of the crowded bustling mass of social beings, in the classic ages of Greece and Rome, would be an invaluable treasure. But all that we should be glad to know of those ages, posterity will learn of ours, from the pencil of truth, though in the hand of fiction.

There is one point, however, which used to be deemed a primary requisite in a fictitious narrative, about which the present generation seems to be

much less fastidious than the last. It is now thought sufficient that the characters, and adventures, and descriptions, be calculated to attract and interest us, when viewed as isolated objects, or with scarcely any reference to the unity and combined effect of the whole fabric of which they form a part. In reading some of the best tales of last age, we seem to move onward along a winding path, where we see but a little way before us at any one moment; and the interest which we feel in contemplating this very limited scene, how beautiful soever it may be, is heightened at every step by the gradual unfolding of new pros pects, and still farther excited by the efforts of imagination to anticipate the sort of scenery which still awaits us in our progress; and at last, when we get to the end of our journey, and from an eminence survey at once the whole ground we have travelled over, we admire the good taste with which it has been planned and executed, and perceive that the whole is consistent amidst infinite variety,—that nothing is the work of chance,—that there is no straining to produce a temporary or independent effect; but that, on the contrary, the mazes of our path, at first so inexplicable and baffling, and the very humblest flower which adorns it, are not merely ornamental, but really indispensable to the ease and confort, as well as the delightfulness of our journey.

In many of our modern novels, on the contrary, the path is so nearly rectilinear, that we have hardly entered on it till we see its termination, as well as its boundaries on every side. There falls on our path, now and then, some gleams of beauty that entice us to proceed. Pit-falls and mantraps, placed at regular distances, arrest the progress of the feeble and unhappy beings in whose company we travel, and, if too many of them still press onward, they are suddenly massacred a little before we reach the end of our journey. Even of our popular novels, not a few may be not inaptly compared to a wilderness--of varied beauty and sublimity, it is true, but still a wilderness in which there is no visible path at all. In short, it would seem as if the imagination were divided into two distinct provinces, over only one of which the novelist of the pre

sent day holds dominion,-that in which his materials are created, fashioned, and polished, with infinite variety of beauty; while the other, appropriated to the construction of the perfect machine, in which these materials should be artfully combined so as to produce the fullest effect, has been by some means or other rendered inaccessible. To whatever cause it may be owing, it is certain that very little of the popularity of our most admired modern novels can be ascribed to their stories. The habitual indifference which prevails towards this source of interest,-or the experienced difficulty of forming and sustaining a well arranged plot,- -or the supposed propriety of rendering it not altogether inconsistent with the truth of history, in novels of a historical description, may be among the causes, perhaps, of the low state of dramatic composition in this otherwise not unimaginative age.

We have been led to make these desultory remarks by the perusal of Mr Godwin's Mandeville, to which most of them may be easily applied. He has amply availed himself of the extensive and undefined limits of novel writing, but without aiming to attract the notice of his readers by topics of temporary interest; and he not only displays, in a very striking manner, the present fashionable indifference to the artful construction of a fable, but has been content on most occasions to dispense with even the more essential parts of a fictitious narrative,-varied scenery, picturesque description, and surprising incident. There is nevertheless an obvious desire, on the part of this distinguished writer, to gratify the prevailing appetite for deep emotion,-but, at the same time, to stamp his work with more durable characters than belong to those tales of fiction, of which the power to excite emotion is the chief recommendation. The time he has chosen for the appearance of his hero, is one of the most interesting epochs of English history, and the rank to which this personage belongs, and the scene of his scanty adventures, bring him into immediate contact with some of the most important public characters of that tempestuous period; but, notwithstanding this, it is no part of Mr Godwin's design to depict the everyday manners of the age, or the giant

forms that then figured on the stage, or the frightful convulsions which overturned the throne and the altar. The phrenzied state of the public mind does not serve to account for the phrenzy of Mandeville. This "Tale of the Seventeenth Century" is, in short, a tale of any century, or rather, perhaps, as the author seems to have intended it to be, an exposition of the workings of a mind radically diseased, and only very slightly acted upon by any peculiarity of outward circumstances. Mandeville indeed may be taken as the representative of that variety of character which has been supposed to form the link between the inhabitants of earth and the infernal regions. In almost every thing but energy of soul, and strength of arm, he is one of these last; and, taking him altogether, there is certainly less of the man than of the devil in this aptly designated compound.—He is a man of rank and fortune, of a comely person and good natural parts, and yet we can neither love nor respect him; he is miserable, but we do not pity him. He sees the net in which villany seeks to entangle him spread out, and he tamely submits to be caught; and, after much idle meditation, and many brave resolves, he is content to be led about in chains by creatures whom he views with mingled contempt and detestation. All his associates are worthless beings, and those whom he honours with his hatred are among the noblest of the species. With all his pride, and ambition, and elevation of mind, he is not to be charged with a single act of true generosity; and not a shilling of his immense fortune ever wandered to the poor. There is indeed not a drop of the milk of human kindness in his bosom, if we except some instinctive emotions of love and tenderness to his sister,-whose life he afterwards does his best to render as miserable as he succeeds in making his own. What powers of imagination shall suffice to render such a being attractive or interesting, when we recognize in him hardly any of the features of humanity?

There is some faint resemblance, it is true, between this hero and some of the other creations of Godwin's powerful mind. He may have a little of the blood of Caleb Williams in his veins, but he has nothing of the energy and

forbearance of that most interesting personage. Like Caleb Williams he is unhappy, but his sufferings are inflicted by his own hand, and not by the inveterate and unprovoked hostility of others. Fleetwood, as well as Mandeville, is a lover of silence, and solitude, and reverie, and ingenious enough in tormenting himself and others with fancied evils, and he is also for a time the dupe of imposture: Yet this general resemblance almost entirely disappears when we compare the individual features of these portraits. The fate, both of Caleb Williams and St Leon, is decided by their becoming the depositaries of secrets, which the former was urged to seek by a very natural, though not a very laudable curiosity, and the latter by motives which he would have been more than human to have withstood; but the causes to which Mandeville ascribes his sufferings, are clearly such as common prudence would have easily escaped. There are indeed throughout the whole of Godwin's writings some kindred features by which a skilful eye may perhaps trace them to a common origin; but these are to be found, not so much in his principal characters as in the texture of his fables, the mode and style of his narratives-writing always in the person of his hero, and blending somewhat profusely the secret workings of the mind with the actions to which they led, or by means of which they were put in motion; and, above all, in the representations of vice and misery, which fill by far the greater portion of his pages. Whenever we submit to take Mr Godwin for our guide, we are sure to be led into the company of beings, who, whether innocent or guilty, are almost all of them either wretched themselves, or the cause of wretchedness in others. Yet it is not because he is unable to conceive or describe all that is amiable and virtuous, and dignified in the human character-for the characters of the wife of St Leon and their son Charles, and of Henrietta and Clifford in the present tale, forbid such a suppositionthat he delights to explore the dark recesses of the heart. Still it is by this strange predilection that Godwin in prose, and Byron in poetry, are distinguished from all other writers of the present age, not less than by the eminent talents which both of

them devote to this uninviting branch of the anatomy of mind.

It is of less importance, however, to inquire into the views with which Mr Godwin has exhibited such a character as Mandeville, as to consider with what success he has executed the arduous task of attracting the notice of the public towards a personage apparently so revolting and unnatural. Yet that he actually has succeeded, in no ordinary degree, is put beyond all doubt by the favourable reception which his work has already experienced. It is now too late, perhaps, to disturb the settled opinion of the public about its beauties or defects by any thing we could offer; and we shall therefore confine ourselves to an outline of the story,-interposing only a very few passages as a specimen of Mr Godwin's vigour and richness of conception, and the uncommon energy of his language.

Mandeville was born of English parents, in the north of Ireland, in the year 1638; and his father, a younger brother, and an officer under the command of Lord Caulfield, was massacred along with his mother, in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. He is rescued himself by Judith, an Irishwoman, who, after encountering many perils, brings him in safety to a town in possession of the English. Here she is recognized by the Reverend Hilkiah Bradford, chaplain to the garrison in which he was born, deprived of her charge, and treated with the utmost contumely. Hilkiah carries our hero to England to his uncle Audley Mandeville, the head of the family, where, with this Hilkiah as his preceptor, he resides for the next eight or nine years. The residence of his uncle, an old, spacious, and ruinous mansion, surrounded by the sea and an insalubrious desert, seems to have been excellently adapted to its possessor, a feeble, sensitive, melancholy being, who had formerly contrived to fall in love, and been crossed by a stern father, and had now, for many years, vegetated in total seclusion. Mandeville and his tutor are admitted to the presence of this automaton for two minutes, once a month,-and they were his only visitors. The domestics of course are all well-trained, grave, solemn, silent personages. In this dismal abode, Mandeville's mind seldom received any cheerful impres

sions, and he early felt delighted "in listening to the pattering of the rain, the roaring of the waves, and the pelting of the storm." In the meantime, he makes astonishing progress for his years in Latin and Greek, -in the main topics of controversy be tween the Church of England and the Church of Rome, and in gloomy meditations, and unsocial feelings, and lofty notions of his own powers and destinies;-yet Mandeville loved not his able instructor, who seems, however, to have treated him with great gentleness. Hilkiah dies at the time when Mandeville must have been about twelve years of age, and our hero soon after exchanges the gloom and silence of Mandeville-House, for the more congenial society of boys of his own age in the public school of Winchester.

We may take leave to pause a moment at this important stage in our progress, for the purpose of observing, that hitherto there has been nothing so romantic in the narrative, so far, at least, as it relates to Mandeville himself, as to prepare us for what is to follow. On the contrary, with the exception, perhaps, of his singular precocity, his feelings, his habits, and his propensities, may be all traced to the peculiar circumstances in which he is placed. Even his dislike to the person of his preceptor, at the very time when he regards him with the utmost reverence and gratitude, is not, we suspect, an unnatural sentiment in a boy of that age. The happiness which he enjoys in the company of his sister Henrietta, immediately before he proceeds to Winchester, and the tone of kindly feeling in which he speaks of the lady with whom she lived and of her husband, lead us to hope that his habits of reverie and gloomy abstraction, Would soon give way to mirth and gladness among his new associates. This part of the work we know has been thought less interesting than some of the stormy scenes which follow; to us it appears very differently. We do not know where so ingenious and apparently so faithful a view of the feelings and aspirations of a young mind will be found; nor by whom the influence of early impressions has been so ably delineated. But to re

turn.

The boys of Winchester school, like

Mandeville himself, are rather extraordinary beings for their time of life,

politicians and philosophers, not by rote, but on principle, and pretty well skilled in all the controversies of the period. At the head of these hopeful youths, in splendid talents, and fascinating manners, and benevolent affections, stands Clifford,-who makes very fine speeches in praise of poverty, and actually converts all the school to his mode of thinking to such a degree, that those young gentlemen who had any pretensions to wealth and rank were seriously ashamed of them. Mandeville is for a moment carried along with the stream in the admiration of Clifford, but he soon reasons himself into a very cordial abhorrence both of Clifford and his admirers, that is, of nearly all his school-fellows, and takes up with a cowardly selfish urchin, of the name of Waller, for no better reason than that, as he imagined, he could manage this person as he pleased. In this point, however, he is speedily undeceiv ed; a compound of cowardice and knavery required a more skilful hand than Mandeville's to manage; he soon becomes himself the victim of his humble and inoffensive associate's talents, and is saved from public infamy only by the kind-hearted ingenuity and decision of Clifford. It is now that the real character of Mandeville begins to be developed-his overweening pride and self-conceit, his fiend-like envy and malignity; and all his bad passions have for their object a being to whose talents and merits he always does ample justice, and from whom he had never received the slightest injury. His, indeed, are the sentiments in miniature which have been ascribed to Satan when he beheld the happiness of our first parents, and the beauties of Paradise fresh from the hands of their Creator. When we part with our hero on his leaving Winchester, the hopes which we were willing to indulge of him at his entering it are considerably abated. The seeds that were sown in his mind while he resided in the gloom and desolation of Mandeville-House, are clearly perceived to have taken deep root, and pushed out vigorous stems in this congenial soil. His case, however, does not yet appear desperate.

From Winchester Mandeville proceeds to Oxford, where he makes acquaintance with a relation of the cele

brated Lord Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. The only recommendation of this poor youth was a confirmed consumption, and he soon after expired in Mandeville's arms. My pride was gratified while I played towards him the part of a guardian genius." He is then invited to the seat of Sir Anthony, whose character, we think, is ably drawn, and recommended by this gentleman to the situation of secretary to the commander-in-chief of an enterprise about to be undertaken in behalf of the exiled monarch in the west of England. At this period he is only seventeen years of age, and does not appear to have made any great progress in the study of military affairs, or the mysteries of diplomacy; and truly if the adherents of the Stuarts were chiefly such men as Mandeville, there is nothing very surprising in the fortune of Cromwell. Sir Joseph Wagstaff, the commander of this ill-fated enterprise, rejects the recommendation of Sir Anthony, though supported by the friendly officiousness of Colonel Penruddock, and bestows this difficult and important office on a person about the same age, who turns out to be no other than Clifford. The demoniacal malice of Mandeville, and the goodness of heart and polished manners of Clifford, are well contrasted in the following passage:

som.

"It was my fortune, that I no sooner entered the hall, than I perceived Clifford. Sir Joseph was by his side; and I saw had just been presenting him to the officers and gentlemen-volunteers of his battalion, in his new character of secretary to the commander-in-chief. I looked upon him: he was a head taller than when we last met, and was radiant with youthful beauty. I withdrew my eyes in confusion: all the demons of hatred took their seat in my boI looked again: a spell had passed over him, and every feature appeared aggravated, distorted and horrible. O, yes! cried I to myself, I see the sneer of infernal malice upon his countenance. How odious is the vice of hypocrisy! How much anore honourable the honest defiance of unmitigable hate! Yes, Clifford, yes! let us shake hands in detestation, and pronounce a vow of eternal war. Tell me fairly at Wherever I meet you, I will hunt you; I will do you every mischief in my power; I will ride over you in triumph, and tread you down to the pit of hell!""

once,

"Clifford came up to me. My dear Charles,' he said, I should have been glad rather to meet you on any other occa

sion. 1 am truly sorry for my appointment, since it is a source of mortification to you. Believe me, I would gladly withdraw from it, if my retirement would secure its being bestowed on you. I set no value on the treasures of ambition. My temper is careless and gay; and you, with a sensibility all trembling and alive, will find it hard to bear disappointment. But Sir Joseph, I plainly see, is resolute against your pretensions. Bear with me then, my friend, and let us be friends still. This rivalship is as momentary, as it is accidental; and glad I shall be to march by your side, in still increasing harmony, through the journey of life. Charles, your hand! "Was not this infernal malice? I know not. To me it appeared so. He triumphed over me every way. Oh, Clifford, wear your honours modestly! What needed all this strut and ostentation, this pomp, pride, and circumstance' of boastful success? This was the very root and kernel of the mischief of which I complained. I was to be eclipsed, after every fashion in which inferiority and contempt could be thrown upon me."

Mandeville flies from the scene of his disappointment, without taking leave of Sir Joseph Wagstaff, or even of his friend Colonel Penruddock, and returns to Oxford, where at last he finds a young man "of a cast of mind similar to his own." They spend whole evenings together in silence, interrupted occasionally by a trial of skill in cursing Cromwell and the regicides, and the Pope, and the Cardinals, and the Jesuits, in a very deliberate and systematical manner.

Come, now," say these worthies, when the passion for change moved them, "Come, now let us curse a little!" But these exercises, from which they derived the most salutary gratification, were soon terminated by a report, not very creditable to our hero, about his Wiltshire adventure; and of this, of course, his evil demon Clifford, must bear all the blame, though he acknowledges him to be entirely innocent. He now leaves Oxford with as little ceremony as he had left Sir Joseph Wagstaff's, and becoming mad in good earnest, is carried to a receptacle for lunatics, where he is attended by his sister; and, upon his recovery, they proceed together to Beaulieu, the residence of Mrs Willis, the lady with whom Henrietta lived. Here, Henrietta, who, though younger than himself, is nevertheless not a whit behind Clifford in wisdom and eloquence, reads him many a pro