nor that, is not fit for a man of letters. If I cannot have a wife who will assert a place in a future dissertation De bonis eruditorum uxoribus, let me at least have one that will not escape a writer De malis eruditorum uxoribus. Any thing but obscurity; any thing but mediocrity.' In the same spirit, these writers seem to say: 'if we cannot be mentioned as those who have written in the best taste, we will be named as those who have written in the worst; if we cannot have the purest sentiments, we will have the vilest; any thing but obscurity-any thing but mediocrity.'

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"Bulwer-to use a happy phrase of Walpole," said Wilkins, "always writes in issimo. He uses the dialect of Brobdignag. If a man's mind is uncomfortable, it is with him-a hell! If one sustains a loss which will probably never be made good, it is, in his language, a curse and an immortality! His exaggerations would make Heraclitus laugh through his tears. The passion which is stamped on his pages exists always rather in the words than in the sentiment. It is not that excited feeling finds vent in burning eloquence which swells and glows like glass under the breath of the blower, but he seems in the dearth of energy to pour forth these blustering syllables for the purpose of being himself roused by them to ecstasy; to work himself up like a bully by beating the air. This style is in description what rant is in acting-always growing mightier, as true passion wanes. There is a certain calmness about the acme of feeling-a security which seems to indicate that the suffering transcends the powers of language to utter it, or the strength of the sensibilities to cope with it-a composure in the midst of the most awful scenes -which it is the highest effort of art to portray; the rage and the violence belong to inferior grades of sensation, and are the exhibition of meaner artists. When Shylock, in fear of a loss, lances wild threats upon the city's charter, you see that he is strongly excited: when the whole prostrating truth bursts upon him, he says, 'send the deed after me: I am not well.' Compare this with Croly's Cataline, with the manner of Maturin, Godwin and Bulwer, and you will perceive the differ

ence between the master and the man. As a general remark, by-the-by, our elder classics exhibit the best specimens of energetic feeling temperately expressed. Lord Byron may be taken as a specimen of power united with fury-the might and vehemence of the whirlwind. Bulwer has copied all his disorder and only forgotten his strength; he is a prose Lord Byron-without his genius."

"In looking at the productions of all first-rate artists," said Gauden," Shakspeare, Homer, and Scott, for example -it is clear that in every case they are above their subject-they are never overmastered by a passion which they would develope. In the midst of the contest, in the height of the agony, the narrator is cool and judging; his own sympathies absolutely sleep, and his creations are altogether impersonal. That the excitement shall be in the action and not in the author-that the moving representative shall be the calm exhibition of a troubled scene and not the troubled exhibition of a calm one-is, I apprehend, the experimentum crucis of art. The strife of Byron and the confusion of Bulwer are the pictures of an ordinary interest mirrored in a disturbed fancy. Homer's song of the battles on the banks of the Simois is as passionless and calm as 'the reflection of them in the stream might be. His poem shows action in repose, boundless passion never tumultuous. Doubtless the interest must originate with the author, but his business is to transfer it all to his subject. If it be conceded and I take it to be undeniable-that genius is but the highest art, and that, invention being equal, the palm must be given to him in whom judgment is most despotic, we settle the question of merit, when we say that Shakspeare and Scott write like the masters of passion, and Byron and Bulwer like its slaves."

"Bulwer chiefly aspires to the praise of portraying character," said Wilkins, "and it is there that his failure is most ridiculous. His system is Rochefoucauld caricatured. He confounds the concentrative and generalising quality of a descriptive character with the broad and diversified substance of a dramatic one. In an epigram we may say, metaphorically and extremely, that a man

never means a compliment but he makes an insult; but to introduce a Lord Aspeden actually making every speech throughout a long conversation, an elaborate rudeness, is totally to mistake the limits of art: it is to forget the person in the character; to lose the man in the manner; to evaporate the substance into the quality. It may be said that in many of the plays of the old stage-writers, Shakspeare among the number, the personages are mere embodiments of a feeling or ideawhat Ben Jonson calls personified 'humours.' But this great distinction is to be taken, that Richard and lago are characters of passion, and a passion may well leaven the whole individual into its own similitude, whereas Aspeden, Brown, and that cluster in the 'Disowned,' are but the character of manners, and manner is an affectation which can but flit over the surface, not enter into the soul.' The qualities of nearly all his heroes are mixed in impossible combinations: the flippancy of one, the philosophy of another, and the feeling of a third are selected; and, with the address of an Orford and the morals of a Shippen; the prudence of a sage and the gayety of a boy; a fop's extravagance and a warrior's fortitude-are all assigned to a common man of the world. This, as Piranesi told Fuselli, is not designing but building a man. It is a want of psychological truth. A Henry Pelham may have really existed, and may again exist, but the novelist has to do with generalities; he is to describe a species, not an individual. Fact is the field of the historian, and probability of the romance-writer: and when the latter errs against verisimility, although he is supported by facts, he violates truth as much as the other does when he contradicts documents for the purpose of making a credible story. Herein Bulwer wanders farther than Byron; for the poet's characters being in wild and imaginary scenes may be warped into a strangeness which we cannot venture to deny; but the novelist's personages being on the terra firma of a brick pavement, and breathing the common air of cities, are within a far narrower law. Lara, in his wild solitudes, above and beyond the sympathies of the world, is in a very different predicament

- St. James's street,

from Henry Pelham, Esquire, No. who reads newspapers, and keeps appointments by St. Stephen's clock. Besides, Byron's people are self-consistent; they are under the control of some one great impulse, and not swayed by a score of opposing ones, Wolfe, Glanville, Mordaunt, and all that class of choking gentlemen are creative lies; the author does not say 'the thing which is not,' but he images the thing which cannot be. They are, like Macbeth's dagger,

A false creation,

Proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain.

His greatest blunder, however, is the character of Aram. His object in that story was to show that a man might be guilty of a great crime, such as murder, without having his nature depraved by it; and to demonstrate this he falsified the character of a man whose story proved precisely the reverse; for the real Aram was a dirty and vulgar scoundrel. Fortunately Bulwer's theory is as false as it is mischievous, for wherever he has deserted fact he has erred from truth."

"Bulwer forgets," said Dr. Gauden, "that most men as well as women, have no characters at all.' He overlooks that class which Nature makes by the gross, and sets no mark upon them;' a class which largely shades the light of life, and should find a place in the tablet of the faithful portrayer of humanity. He willingly essays the complications of a Hamlet, but the exquisite nothingness of a James Gurney is beyond his skill. He discerns on the shoulders of every lackey a head that might inform the counsels of cabinets. His heroes have their dinners announced by men who might put the Duc de la Rochefoucauld to the blush. Every jockey salutes them with an epigram, and every landlord converses in syllogism. His very animals have characters: tot canes, tot ingenia. His philosophy, though it seems to me but a trick of words, commends him I believe to many, who, captured by any thing that is brilliant and novel, do not stop to inquire if it is true. When I daily hear perspicuous writers, such as Addison, Goldsmith, and Scott, put aside as superficial

·

thinkers, and the tripod given to those who are consi dered deep only because they are obscure, I am tempted to keep in mind, a curious but most valuable remark of Bolingbroke upon that point. To speak the truth,' says that sagacious writer, though it may seem a paradox, our knowledge on many subjects and particularly on philosophy and metaphysics, must be superficial to be real. This is the condition of humanity.' If Scott has no system of human action, it is because human action cannot be systematised. But one might pardon even greater charlatanry than Bulwer's, if it were set forth in tolerable English. His style, with its varnish of words and its garnish of flowers,' is decidedly the most vicious of the age; I can forgive almost any thing but the one-legged poetry of staggering prose. He does not use comparisons for illustrations; simile seems to be with him a mode of writing. It puts me fairly out of temper to see a man, circling round some thin notion in endless gyrations of metaphor. Scott uses tropes very freely, but his flowers have always the significancy of an eastern garland."

"All Bulwer's conceptions," said Wilkins, "lack the freshness of true creation. There is a total want of generosity in the author's mind. It is in this wide nobility of sentiment, this sympathy with the free and the foreign, that Scott stands so pre-eminent. All his characters are sparkling with the dews of natural life. When Richard met Saladin, and was challenged by the Saracen to a trial of strength, he undertook to sever with his sword, an iron bar of an inch and a half diameter. One of his attendants warned him of the magnitude of the enterprise, and his own enfeebled health from illness. Peace, villain!' cried Richard, settling himself firmly on the ground and looking round with fierceness, Thinkest thou that I could fail in his presence?' I doubt whether Mr. Bulwer would have understood the feeling."

"We may safely venture to admire personally the man who writes so," said I, "for he must have had a touch of the crusader in him, who describes crusaders so well. Bulwer never succeeds in placing his charac