with the first kiss; he therefore prudently avoids saluting his mistress with his lips for a dozen years. A second confounds the means with the end, imagines the state of being in love is the happiest, and looks upon what the lover of passion hails as the summit of his wishes-the possession of his mistress-as the first step of love's decline. Another is so fastidious in his views, and possesses so much of what phrenologists would call "adorativeness" in his pericranium, that being in love, with him, (and oftentimes bending at a shrine at which no mortal being but himself would feel inclined to bow the knee,) is an act of complete devotion. Thus, much of love depends upon imagination rather than upon any thing positive; for there are instances of being in love with an imaginary object, as in some singularly constituted dispositions with a statue, like the Parisian girl who fell in love with the Apollo Belvidere.

The epoch of being in love, notwithstanding all, is the most agreeable in the whole course of life. The soul has then no craving to gratify. Existence is at its highest premium, for it is then we are farthest from indifference. He who is in love cherishes life, and but enjoys it the better for little drawbacks in other affairs, which only heighten love's relish when we return to it. It is a better and pleasanter thing than money-getting, or courtiership, or sullen study, or maddening ambition, or a thousand gasping desires that engross us wholly without our feeling satisfaction in their pursuit. These are solitary objects; being in love is participated with another, and therefore it is a more social pleasure. The romantic tinge which often colours our conduct, is an agreeable characteristic; it increases the attraction, and confers a hallowed charm upon the passion. Being in love is a restraint upon evil feelings-a situation favourable to virtue. The love of woman is a corrective of our perverse natures, and, while its season lasts, always mends the heart. Let an unbiassed and discriminating centenaire answer what part of life he could look back upon with the most kindly feelings-what portion of his departed years he most cherished in his remembrance, and he would doubtless answer, the time when he was in love. The memo

ry of that delicious season, its little adventures, its hopes, fears, and enjoyments, always come over us with a rush of pleasing warmth, a sunbeam piercing the clouds of departed time, and irradiating for a moment our tottering steps and grey hairs. Being in love mingles us with the better things of life, keeps beautiful forms perpetually before the eye, gives us pleasing dreams, elevates the spirits, and exalts our views. It tempers our harsher dispositions with the gentleness of beauty, and subdues our proudest pretensions to the government of tears and caresses of mildness and persuasion. He who has never been in love is a miserable blockhead, who is ignorant of the highest joy this distempered life possesses for mortals. Being in love is, in fact, a sort of millenium far above all life's other good. I would desire no better state than that of being in love for a thousand years; and, as Quin wished he had a mouth from England to Nova Scotia, and every inch of the way palate, that he might fully enjoy John Dory, I would demand the temperament of youth from seventeen to twenty-five for the above space of time, and all its ardent susceptibility to heighten my long season of innocence and happiness.

Y. I.

QUENTIN DURWARD.

"What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

Another yet! a seventh!"

MACBETH. NOTWITHSTANDING the amusement which the "Novels by the author of Waverley" afford in the perusal, the astounding rapidity with which they succeed to each other gives-the reviewer at least, something more to do than is absolutely pleasant. The New Monthly Magazine is not more regular in its periodic appearances than these works; yet the necessity of reading whatever bears the signature, or rather the enigma, of their author, is absolute; and this necessity, we must confess, has more than once given birth within us to a movement of impatience and waspishness on the announcement of "Another Novel from the great Unknown," something analogous to that betrayed by Macbeth, in the passage which serves as our motto at the head of the page. Latterly also, to make matters worse, these announcements have so enchained themselves one within the other, that it has been impossible to engage them single-handed, or to encounter the perusal of one production without the appalling consciousness that its younger brother is "in the press," ready to pounce upon us the moment that the work in hand shall have done its business with the public. Thus the labour of the reader is brought to resemble that of the Danaides; and the "never-ending, still beginning" task occasions a flutter of the nerves, which requires all the charm of this author's dialogue and description to dissipate and appease.

Determined to "strike whilst the iron is hot,"-or, to use a proverb more congenial to July weather, "to make hay while the sun shines," and resolved, like good Queen Elizabeth, with her prayer-loving subjects, to give his readers "enough of it," the author of Waverley does not neglect the harvest of his popularity: and the expedition with which he conducts his movements, seems to indicate that, like some popular engravers, he must employ many assistants, to whose labours, after due touching up and polishing, he puts his own all-powerful signature-a letter of recommendation to the whole reading public of Great Britain, Germany, and France.

Every thing about these works, in truth, is singular. The dexterity, with which the friends of the "great poet of the north" contrive to keep the public unsatisfied respecting his share in their production,— the number of extrinsic causes, (dramatizing, illustrating by engravings, music, and subsidiary publications, &c. &c.) that are brought to bear in support of their popularity,—the intrinsic interest they possess,-and the nature and management of the means which are made to produce this interest, no less than the rapidity of their succession,-all combine to render their appearance one of the most striking phænomena in the literature of the present age, and a marked sign of the times in which we live.

Those who are unacquainted with the business of novel-writing, imagine that nothing more is necessary than to sit down before a ream of paper, and pour forth the products of a teeming brain, with about the same degree of effort that it requires to assure some "Dear Cousin" in the country that "all at home are well," and that we are, "with best love to enquiring friends," the said dear Cousin's "very affec

tionate and obedient servant."-The reverse of all this is, however, the case. The quantity of reading in history, geography, chronology, antiquities, and even in arts and sciences, necessary to give consistency, probability, and colouring to a work of imagination, requires, with the most industrious, the labour of months, before a pen is put to paper for the immediate purpose of composition.*

For the "getting up," as the stage-manager would call it, of Quentin Durward, for instance, besides a diligent search through the historians, through Commines, Brantome, Jean de Troyes, and the rest of the memoir-writers, an immense quantity of Scottish lore must have been collected in order to trick out the Scotch guard in all the verisimilitudes of names, families, manners, and domestic anecdote. The trifling scene of the false herald alone, could not be detailed without a more intimate acquaintance with the pseudo-science of blazonry than usually falls to the lot of any man, save a German Baron, or a thorough-paced and inveterate antiquarian.

Those who profess the faith, or the heresy, that Sir Walter Scott is the author of these works, relate that he "writes" them during his hours of attendance in the courts: but, besides the ingenuity he must practise to hide his operations from the notice of the public, by which he is at those times surrounded, he must possess the more wonderful property of knowing by intuition facts, of which others obtain the knowledge by the most intense application. Sir Walter Scott is not only represented as a man of official occupation, as a politician actively participating in the wrangling polemics of the Edinburgh parties, but as a very convivial and social member of a remarkably social community, as a bustling farmer, and a constant improver of his favourite demesne at Abbotsford. That, amidst all these associations, he should be the sole "Author of Waverley" and of its successors, seems next to a physical impossibility. The mere mechanical task of putting together the materials of a three-volume novel, after they have been collected, supposing the book to be written currente calamo, without reconsideration or recopying,―would occupy months of exclusive and laborious application; and this is a necessity which no genius can avert, a labour no talent can abbreviate. In this respect, some little advantage of habit apart, Sir W. Scott and the writers of the Leadenhall press are on a perfect equality. If this gentleman, therefore, is the "Brazen mask" of the literary pantomime of hide and seek, it amounts almost to demonstration that he is powerfully-assisted by a knot of subaltern drudges; and that he does little more than select the story, dispose the plan, write particular scenes, and give that sort of finish to the whole, which preserves to the book the unity of its colouring. It has indeed been asserted respecting the "Pirate,"—we know not with what truth, that it is the exclusive production of a certain member of Sir

* It has been the custom of our popular novelist to commence by drawing up a map of the scene of action, in the same way that a general would trace a geographical sketch of his intended campaign.

The Editor of the New Monthly Magazine sanctions the publication of this theory for the amusement of his readers, but begs not to be made responsible for believing it.

Walter's family; and that it received only the revision and the adoption of the "Author of Waverley."

Some probability perhaps is added to this hypothetical notion by a marked difference observable at the first glance over the different novels in the single particular of character. In the earlier, and more appropriately called "Scotch Novels," there is often displayed an intense degree of moral interest, in which the majority of the later productions are comparatively deficient. The death of the heroic Jacobites in Waverley, the strongly conceived, and finely shaded contrasts of the Serjeant and Burley, the whole description of the fanatic march, and the scene of torturing the preacher in "Old Mortality," possess an unspeakable grasp on our sympathy; for they abound with traits of humanity, in its striking and important modifications. Rob Roy is a master's sketch of a fine, bold, generous disposition, worked upon and demoralized by the force of events; and even the Baillie's eccentricities are set off with such touches of nature and feeling as often remind us-what more can we say-of Shakspeare himself. Of this excellence a smaller degree exists in the more recent productions; in which the characters differ from each other, chiefly in the shades of that weakness, or of that wickedness, which are common to them all.

In Quentin Durward, partly perhaps from the selection of the age and scene, the defect of character is singularly discoverable. Throughout all the novels, indeed, the author has shewn a stronger disposition to portray external nature, than to study and develope the workings of internal moral feeling and truth. Even when he enters deepest into pathos and intellectual character, his effort is always connected with a view rather to please us with the picturesque, than to sublimate our ethical principles. But in his later productions, he seems to sacrifice more than ever to picturesque effect, and he even exercises his ingenuity in giving relief to the most degraded characters which history exhibits, and in shedding the lights of an innocent and humorous peculiarity over the deepest and darkest shades of vice and crime. That the author of these novels, whoever he may be, is a devoted tory, will be no matter of new information to any of his readers; and on the ground of simple and abstracted opinion, it would be illiberal to quarrel with him. That he should even have glossed over the political offences of a Charles and a James, in order to paint those heroes of legitimacy under the traits of an amiable and gossiping privacy, may not be thought to exceed that measure of misrepresentation which the temper of our times, heated by incessant conflict and mutual injustice, appears to tolerate; but when he selects as a fit object for pencilling and adornment the infamous Louis XI., and when he dwells with a minute and complacent satisfaction on Tristrem l' Hermite, and the two canting and jesting buffoons, his subaltern executioners, we cannot help objecting to a taste and moral tact, apparently at variance with the mind which conceived and delineated a Jenny Deans.

With all the fascination which the author's vividness of genius throws over the characters of this story, there is still something in them all that is repulsive to a mind of moral and contemplative sensibility. Quentin himself, though he has energy and decision, is an adventurer and a mercenary, who offers his courage and his sinews to the furtherance of the most atrocious and perfidious tyranny that the barbarism

of modern Europe has produced, with an indifference which, however natural in the feudal aristocrat of the Scotland of those days, ought to disqualify him for the attachment of a heart of civilized times.. The band of Scottish archers, which he sought to join from so vast a distance, in addition to the characteristics of cruelty and licentiousness common to all mercenaries, was marked for avoidance by its recent treachery in quitting the service of Charles VII. and joining the party of his rebellious and unnatural son, for a round sum of money. This circumstance should have made a deep impression on the mind of an ingenuous boy of gentle culture, whose love for his own parents must have been exalted by their bloody and unrevenged death; and the little coquetting squeamishness introduced to palliate the hero's conduct, serves only to place his moral obtuseness in a stronger light. Even Charles the Bold, whose chivalrous and unsuspecting frankness might have afforded some bright lights to the picture, is by a felicitous exercise of the author's colouring, shaded down below the tone of his ferocious rival, whose gloomy criminality shews like philosophy, as it is set off by the mere animal impulses which are made to actuate the conduct of the Duke of Burgundy.

Much of this moral defect, it is true, may perhaps follow unconsciously from the author's obstinate determination to defend indefensible points of history, to diminish the keen sensibility of the public to political truth, and to generate that indifference to public interests which is favourable to the propagation of the Tory creed. The romantic and picturesque points of feudality brought forward on the canvass may serve to beget a distaste for the colder and sterner aspects of a civilized and philosophical æra; and state criminals, portrayed with dramatic effect, and ornamented with the mock jewelry of candle-light virtues, may be made to engender a pernicious tolerance for political offenders; but, to produce this effect, the reader must be hurried forward, as over a quaking marsh, which affords no permanent footing for his steps; events must be presented with something of the vagueness of a dream; visions must succeed to visions, with a rapidity that leaves no pause for reflection; the imagination must alone be kept alert, and judgment be drugged into a diseased and unnatural slumber. Still, however, the later publications of the Author of Waverley are more surcharged with this defect, which we feel ourselves thus called upon to censure, than is necessary for the object that seems in a great degree to influence his writings; and a shade of probability arises, that the excess may be the work of coarser and clumsier spirits, which, in imitating their original and following the plan he has chalked out for them, have caricatured his system, and introduced faults which the master's hand has been unable to correct.

But, whatever inference may be drawn from the author's increased appetite for painting mankind under their worst aspects, it is a circumstance that becomes more striking at each succeeding publication. The system of decorating despotism is persevered in with unabated vigour, and each new novel is a special pleading in favour of passive obedience. We are not without apprehension that these observations may appear to some persons to be harsh and excessive. But let it be recollected against what evil we protest against the misfortune of the greatest genius of the age conveying false impressions to the public of the great political