for us to fathom; over which clouds and thick darkness hover; and which, to many of our minds, exhibit, in the present, anything but mercy. Be all this as it may, we have the certain assurance of spiritual felicity, so long as we continue in unity with God; and the mere wish to be happy in alienation from our Maker, is, in itself, a sin.

In this letter, I have purposely confined myself to that part of Professor Stuart's dissertation, in which he remarks on the article in the Christian Examiner above named, setting aside the general substance of his entire work. I will trust your goodness to endure whatever burden I may have laid upon your patience, in calling your attention to these observations.

Yours respectfully,

E. S. G.

Sandwich, Aug. 9, 1830.

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ART. III.-Paul Clifford. By the AUTHOR of Pelham,' 'The Disowned,' and Devereaux.' New York. J. & J. Harper. 1830. 2 vols. 12mo. pp. 215, 216.

No one, we think, can read the work before us, without reprobation and disgust; no one, we mean, who is properly impressed with the importance of moral duty and religious obligation, or who feels sensible that the regulations of society, in regard to property, industry, and personal security, are entitled to any respect.

The tendency, if not the design of the work, is to remove the restraints which the laws and institutions of society impose on the bad passions of depraved and dissolute men, by portraying, in brilliant colors, their manners, habits, and modes of lifegiving the charm of energy, courage, and heroism, to the conduct of thieves and highwaymen; and, by throwing into the shade whatever penalty remorse might inflict, or the contempt and detestation of society impose on them, to present, in strong relief, the appearance of a real and satisfying happiness, which needs but little aid from integrity, and suffers comparatively nothing by any compunction of conscience. It is in fact to inculcate, by the most vivid examples, that moral distinctions are quite unessential to personal happiness, and that, in the

most contemptuous and habitual disregard of them, there is found about as much genuine satisfaction, and as strong a claim to admiration and esteem, as in their exact observance.

Nor is this all. These distinctions themselves are scouted at and derided, as mere human inventions. All laws are represented as iniquitous and unjust; the institutions by which they are protected, are treated with sarcastic or open indignity, and the men by whom they are administered, presented, not only as base, corrupt, and infamous, but as made so by the operation of those principles or arrangements of society, on which hitherto we have been taught materially to depend for our security and happiness. In fact, if our author is to be trusted, religion and morals, honor, fidelity, and truth have no natural existence; the institutions, which profess to teach or preserve them, are mere contrivances of chicanery and fraud; the men who administer government, in whatever departments they are found, are most eminently absolved from all regard to any interests but their own, and solely occupied in imposing weights on the subdued spirits of the subject, which it should be with him a point of honor, as well as duty, to throw off; so that, as we are tempted to believe, the most respectable members of the community are felons, of whom, by our author's graduated scale, pickpockets are in the lowest, and highwaymen in the highest rank. There is a charm, a beauty, a nobleness infused into their mode of life, which should draw to it all the choice spirits, the gay, daring, reckless and pleasure-loving members of the community! This is something beyond that satanic school of poetry, of which Byron is the principal master; it is a step or two further in that course of delusive sophistry, which, at its commencement, startled the sober sense of mankind, and prevailed only by the extraordinary genius with which its paradoxes were pursued and defended.

Paul Clifford is a robber, the captain of a band of highwaymen. His associates and companions, when he is moving in the sphere to which he properly belongs, are thieves and robbers; and when he gains admission, as the author extravagantly supposes him to do, into honest society, it is by hypocrisy and deception, by means of an artful concealment,-which is all the while a practical falsehood,-of his real character and course of life. All this would be disgusting enough, if it were detailed with accuracy or plausibility; but it is the design of the author to excite a strong and deep interest for his hero, and of course the low

and profligate scenes of daily life, in which such characters are engaged, are to be raised and refined; the coarse conversation of vulgar, uneducated companions, is to be polished and purified; and although this is done to an extent that is unnatural and absurd, there is yet a vulgarity and indecency in the dialogue, which is little adapted to gratify intellectual readers. The principal character is to be rescued from the detestation which is naturally felt at his conduct, by endowing him with a romantic and captivating chivalry, a generosity in his rapaciousness, and a gentlemanlike manner in his outrages; giving him a sort of petit maître mode of committing a larceny, that, because of the fashion of the manner, we may be willing to forgive, ah, even to admire the action itself!

All this is done, too, by design,-on a plan and a system. The novice actually studies his profession. He reads the memoirs of the great Turpin, a hanged highwayman, whom he adopts for his model, as the young soldier warms his imagination over the memoirs of Marlborough and Turenne. But, notwithstanding all this, the old prejudices of society would induce us to consider him as in fact only a thief; and a thief, we are accustomed to think, is the lowest, meanest, basest of mankind. To overcome these antiquated notions, the author has kindly contrived to lay all the blame on the laws and institutions of society. He never omits a sarcasm on the establishments of justice or the forms of civil government, and never fails to introduce such incidents as may bring them into contempt. Indeed, the character of the hero, seems, in the judgment of our author, to be the natural offspring of the existing constitution of society; and although it is not very obvious whether, according to his theory of morals, larceny be a crime, yet if indeed it be one, the blame of it is transferred from the thief, who is little more than a passive instrument of destiny, to the laws and the magistrates and the forms of society which influence him. Certainly, in the picture he has given us, the highwayman is quite as respectable as the judge; and the code by which the former is governed, is not a whit less reasonable and praiseworthy, than that system, which, under the name of law, he would represent to be the real creator of what we should call wickedness and guilt.

In pursuance of this design, the character of Sir William Brandon is an important part of the work. This personage, the father of the hero by a clandestine marriage, is an eminent

lawyer and judge, with a fair prospect of promotion to the highest honors of his profession, while at the same time he is as entirely free from all the restraints which morality imposes, as the vilest criminal whom he sentences to death, and is in fact indirectly the cause of that course of iniquitous life, which, that it may not too much degrade the hero, the author has contrived to impute to this eminent jurist.

We object to this work, that it presents entirely false views of individual character, and that its tendency is thereby to make such persons as it feigns. We do not mean that there may not be unjust magistrates; but we venture to say, that, except by the especial favoritism of absolute power, certainly not existing in the country where these scenes are laid, men of such character do not, by the mere force of their depravity, make their way to the bench. We do not mean to say, that there are not unwise laws; but we believe that no intelligent man will pretend that the main tendency of all jurisprudence is to make candidates for the gallows. The principal character of the novel is in our opinion wholly and extravagantly fictitious. A nobleminded, generous highwayman, a kind-hearted, benevolent thief, a pure and sentimental debauchee, an intellectual, accomplished, elegant and fashionable companion of uneducated, vulgar, depraved, and dissolute votaries of profligacy and intemperance, is an inconsistent and visionary being, which has no existence in real life, and is here produced with as little good taste as truth, from a desire to offer to a diseased and prurient appetite, something that may gratify its irregular cravings.

We cannot present this objection more strongly than by a plain statement of it. Virtue and vice are, to be sure, singularly blended in the human character; but if there be none perfect, so truly none are utterly and irremediably depraved. There may be, in the worst individuals of the worst class, a redeeming quality, that may vindicate their claims to humanity. But settled, premeditated, intentional disregard to all human and divine laws, wherever such laws would impose a restraint on the passions or interests of an individual, is totally inconsistent with any qualities which can command respect or esteem. The conduct, in such case, whatever it might be, would be directed by caprice, interest or passion; and occasional acts, which might seem the indications of a better mind, would no more be entitled to the appellation of virtue, than the momentary pauses of the storm would be considered as the termina

VOL. IX.-N. S. VOL. IV. NO. I.

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tion of its fury. The predominant habits and manners of life form the character; and it is as difficult to combine the repulsive and contradictory elements of the moral, as of the physical world. The individual, who is stern and ferocious enough to pursue his objects of personal acquisition to the ruin of his fellow beings, by an invasion of their rights, either of security or property, or who foregoes the labors of honest industry, and levies the expenses of his profligacy on such persons as chance places within his power, whether it be by the little arts of petty fraud, or the boldness of open violence, is, and must be, thoroughly depraved and detestable; and the art and genius of the poet, or of the romance writer, are wasted and debased in attempts to conceal the deformity of his vices, by connecting it with the brightness of virtues, which must necessarily be fictitious.

But the effort to make vice less detestable by ingenious palliations and strong contrasts; by opening, as it were, a sort of account current, in which heinous and habitual and weighty offences are to be balanced by imaginary and irreconcileable virtues, is dangerous wherever it is successful, and blamable wherever it is attempted. It may be charity, indeed, to find a palliation for actual transgression, by adverting to other and better qualities in the agent, because, when this is the actual exercise of a candid spirit, it will find the apology it seeks for in nothing but truth. It will never attempt to encircle the penitent it would pardon, with rays of glory, which it is impossible should ever have adorned him.

The writer of a novel has no restriction. He draws from imagination, and he addresses the heart. When the object or the tendency of his work is to make vice fashionable, or lessen the disgust which ought to prevail at every open and unblushing proclamation of it, by throwing round it a charm that can by no possibility exist in reality, and by accompanying it with pretended sentiments and feelings, which, if true, would be some alleviation, but which he knows not to be true in real life, and introduces only that they may disguise the poison he infuses, we can have no respect for his honesty, and must add his name to the long list of those whose interests have made them base enough to corrupt the morals of mankind. Even the talent with which it is done, fails to command the admiration which genius inspires; for we despise the poor and pitiful spirit which condescends to be the caterer of evil, either from low ambition or the meaner desire of personal profit.