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great deal of miscellaneous literature; and while he appears to be relating the story of a gang of mad Irish men and women, he is really expending the fruits of his severer studies. The learning is not, as we shall see, very deep, nor very accurate; but still it is so much above what young ladies would otherwise read at Brighton or Broadstairs, that we think the author is entitled to great commendation for this happy mode of conveying instruction.

We have strong doubts whether it be quite fair to attempt to give a summary of the story. The absurdities, which pass off well enough when spread through three volumes, will hardly bear gathering up into half a dozen lines; and the reader who should look at the mere skeleton of the plot, might accuse the author of pursuing his ridicule too openly, and of destroying the effect of his satire by the extreme lengths to which it is carried. We are aware of all this; but as there are several points of pleasantry which we can hardly bring to light without making some kind of statement of the story, we hope the ingenious author will forgive us if we venture on a brief but faithful abstract of the fable.

In the month of November, (the day unluckily is not mentioned,) in the year 1814, about seven o'clock in the evening, the stage coach which plies between a remote province in Ireland and the capital, broke down at the little village of Lucan, about five miles from Dublin. In this coach happened to be Mr. or rather Master De Courcy, a well-grown lad of good property, who had just left school and was proceeding to finish his education at the university of Dublin. His guardians (like true novel guardians) had sent him · unattended, even by a servant, to find his way into his college, of which he knows nothing, through a city in which he never was. When the coach breaks down all the other passengers choose, most unaccountably, to remain at Lucan for the night, but De Courcythe only one probably who knows nothing of the way-sets forth manfully for the city; the evening was, as usual, delightful, but it degenerated, as usual, into a stormy night: in the outskirts of the town our young traveller meets, as usual, a post-chaise and four driving furiously along-as usual, there is a heroine in it as usual, she is in the power of some monster who is hurrying her away with some atrocious design. De Courcy, as usual, pursues the carriage, and after several of the usual difficulties rescues the beautiful and insensible Eva from an old hag in whose cottage she had been just deposited by the unknown ravisher, and restores her to her guardian, who luckily happens to be in the streets at that time of night, and hearing a person inquiring for a hackney coach naturally guesses he can be no other than the preserver of his niece.-But the guardian is a methodist, who, little inclined to improve his acquaintance with De Courcy, takes his niece home without giving her preserver

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVIII.

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even

even an invitation to pay them a visit the visit of inquiry is notwithstanding paid, and Charles and Eva become deeply enamoured of each other; he, our readers already know, is a perfect model of a man, six feet high, dark eyes, brown hair, and the noblest intelligence of countenance; she, on the contrary, is fair-touchingly fair-her eyes are of the usual melting blue, and her deportment has all the usual amiable and graceful timidity of the soft-eyed maids of romance. She is just fifteen, quite a marriageable age, but as he is only seventeen, and as both are in good health, new incidents must be imagined to make the book go on a little longer before it can be concluded either by death or wedlock.

Accordingly, a brilliant Italian actress arrives in Dublin—not Madame Catalani, but a Madame Dalmatiani, who is a perfect parody of Corinne. With her too De Courcy is fascinated and by degrees enamoured, till at last he divides his time between the methodist meeting-house, where Eva never lifts her gentle eyes from her hymn book, and the theatre, where the adorable Dalmatiani wins all hearts and transports all imaginations. But she is no common actress. She is a woman of property, and rather plays from vanity and enthusiasm than for profit. She keeps a great house, troops of servants, gaudy equipages, an elegant table, and gives splendid assemblies, at which she sings, dances, and talks prose and poetry after the manner of her prototype. She is so fine a judge of the arts that she carries about with her a ‘beautiful cast of the Venus de Medici,' to which she modestly transfers the wreaths which her admirers offer to her. De Courcy is admitted to her select society; she, as in courtesy bound, grows enamoured of him-he, in return, becomes intoxicated with her; but she is, notwithstanding appearances, a woman of nice virtue, and De Courcy is a man of nice honour; so their love is all of a matrimonial tendency, and he offers her his hand. Poor Eva in the meanwhile pines away; she is too gentle to fret. De Courcy has fits of repentance, and Zaira (Madame Dalmatiani) is perplexed between jealousy of the one, love of the other-the stage in the evening-the assembly at night; in short, one wonders how she can avoid running mad.

Sur ces entrefaites, et à propos de bottes, the allies arrive in Paris, and thither the fascinating Zaira and the faithless Charles hasten. They are now inseparable and recognised lovers, and again the novel is threatened with a premature conclusion, when Charles fortunately learns from a French gentleman, that Zaira the young, the beautiful, the pure, has been many years married, and has even borne a child. 'At these words Dé Courcy rushed from the house in a species of fury and despair,' (vol. iii. p. 47.); and the thought of his intellectual' angel's having condescended to bear a child, staggers his resolution of marrying her at this critical

moment

moment his prudent guardian writes to him, (not to know why he has left his college and gone strolling through Europe at the age of seventeen years and seven months,) but to dissuade him from marrying Madame Dalmatiani who is only twice as old as himself, This beautiful and parental epistle concludes in these words:

'Let not the country that can boast a Grattan, a Curran, a Moore, an Edgeworth, a Lady Morgan, a Phillips, a Shiel, reckon a character so degraded among those of her children!

Even this pathetic apostrophe might have failed, and Charles De Courcy might have disgraced the country of Charles Phillips, but that he hears from an acquaintance just arrived from Ireland that Eva is dying-not a sham Irish death,—but really and bonâ fide dying.

This fatal intelligence strikes him to the heart-it is his own death-wound; his constitution, never strong, is suddenly impaired, and his conscience as suddenly awakened; he hastens back to Ireland to attend the bed-side of Eva. Zaira is heart-broken at his evasion, and as near death's door as either Eva or De Courcy-but she musters up strength to follow him. Then comes the usual death-bed eclaircissement-the old hag from whom De Courcy had rescued Eva, and who figures on sundry occasions throughout the work, in all the squalid distraction of an Irish pauper lunatic, turns out to have been once a most beautiful young peasant girl seduced by a man of fortune-Zaira, the young, the elegant, the intellectual, is her bastard daughter, who ran away with an Italian fiddler, and Eva is the child of Zaira and grand-child of the beggar woman!

The conclusion now becomes easy-Eva, De Courcy, and the beggar-woman all die on the spot, and Madame Dalmatiani is left, like Moonshine and Wall, to bury the dead!

Such is the story; and we believe our readers will now agree that it presents a collection of all the extravagancies of all novels which none but a master-hand would have made.

It is now time to show that the execution surpasses the design; materiam superat opus,' as Madame Dalmatiani would have said.

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The imitations of Corinne are too diffuse to be extracted; some of them are very comical, but in others truth obliges us to say there is somewhat of exaggeration. Corinne never talks either Greek or Hebrew; while Zaira is a perfect Polyglott, quotes all the mottos of the Spectators and Ramblers in the original tongue-and talks you

-Greek

As naturally as pigs squeak.

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For instance, when she thinks she is dying the following are represented as her meditations.

'Then crowded on her mind the awful story of that night in Alexandria, when the sound of subterranean music and revelry, passing out towards the enemy's camp, was heard by those who were feasting with Antony and Cleopatra at their last banquet, reminding them terribly of the contrasted splendour of their former destiny, and the gloom of that which was approaching. Then followed the tremendous MiraCavaμsla ETUD, of the Jewish history, when God left them for ever; when Ichabod was pronounced by the voice of the Eternal Judge, and the glory of their hierarchy and their temple departed from them for ever.'-vol. iii. p. 272, 273.

This is but a small sample of Zaira's erudition—the reverend author has artfully contrived to communicate under her name all he knows, and, we sometimes suspect, a little more.

Let us observe how naturally he beguiles his young readers into historical, classical, and scientific knowledge in extracts of a letter from Zaira to Delphine, a French lady of her acquaintance.

'You cannot comprehend what I have felt, since I learned the object of his (De Courcy's) attachment is an evangelical female. You do not exactly understand this phrase, Delphine. You can explain it to yourself by the puritans of Cromwell's time with whose history you are, well acquainted. Mezentius, who united a dead body to a living one, was guilty of a less crime and less cruelty than he who unites De Courcy with this girl. With her sect all the enjoyments, all the privations of life, are to be viewed exactly in the same plane.-Like the Arabian chief when he was going to burn the library of Alexandria, they would have employed the short dilemma.-Would not Guido's Aurora, and Raphael's Cartoons, and Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, be all mortgaged at this moment for the vile wooden cut of an evangelical preacher, with his lank hair and Iscariot visage?-Would not Sculpture, if she pleaded for her life with Laocoon in one hand and Niobe in the other, be rejected for some spruce monument over Dr. Coke or Dr. Huntington?'-vol. ii. p. 139––148.

Thus in order to comprehend the single word evangelical, a young lady may be induced to inform herself concerning the puritans of the seventeenth century and the tyrant Mezentius, whose history she cannot have cheaper than in Lempriere's classical dictionary or Dryden's Virgil; the phrase of seen in the same plane will force her into geometry; the Alexandrian library will open to her the history of Mahomet and his followers. As for dilemmas, Auroras, Iscariots, Cartoons, Laocoons, and Niobes, we suppose she may already have heard of them; but we marvel where she is to look, for the two doctors :-and we are obliged to confess our suspicions, that, in speaking of Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, the reverend author himself hallucinates, and that for Rem

brandt

brandt we should read Rubens. See then what a store of knowledge these passages force upon the reader!

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Delphine's answer,' we are told, contained that mixture of frivolity, wordliness, &c. &c. which formed her character.'-p. 149.

'It is impossible that you can longer deceive yourself. You never deceived me. You love this man. For it happens that we never dream of commencing friends, till we have actually taken our degrees as lovers in the last stage. Then your tirade against that poor girl and her religion. Can any power on earth persuade me, that you would sit down to study divinity, for the sake of abusing a set of people, whom you would care no more about than the Camisards of France; only that you choose to be in love with a boy whom one of these pretty puritans has captivated?

'Fear not, my charming Zaira! there will always be enough to love the world, if all the begging Bonzes of the East were united with all the mendicant orders of Europe, and they again backed by the ghosts of the RUMP-parliament, raised from the dead for the purpose. Do you remember your admirable Shakspeare? "Thinkest thou, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Yea, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot in the mouth too!"

And now, my dear Zaira, that I have removed your apprehensions about the world being turned upside down by these moral Archimedes's, have the goodness to remove mine (if you can) about yourself. All my levity forsakes me when I think of your situation. Waken, waken, my charming Zaira, from your dream! it is but a dream; or sleep on and perish, as the botanists did in their tour of exploration on the coasts of New Holland.

The cant of university-commencements-the Camisards of France -the begging bonzes-the RUMP Parliament-Shakspeare, Archimedes, and Sir Joseph Banks!-A young lady may well exclaim, ' If Delphine be frivolous, what must I be, who, except Shakspeare and that parliament with the queer name, have never heard of any of these affairs? Emulation will be thus generated; information will follow, and boarding-school girls will be as profound as the reverend author of Bertram.

This correspondence concludes with a pleasant ridicule of the inconsistency into which novelists are often betrayed by labouring after consistency. This same learned lady, because she is a French wonian, and of course frivolous, must write thus of the capture of Paris.

““ Mon dieu!—The allies are absolutely within a few leagues of Paris. What horrors surround us! I know not how mon joli chat will escape. They say those Cossacks eat cats! Horrible, I will rather perish first.

"Ah, my beautiful Zaira, the artillery of the allies is sending its thunders from the heights of Montmartre. What an event! How astonishing! What a disgrace to the history of civilised nations!

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Paris,

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