is not the only mischief: we learn, at length, to look forward to tragical catastrophes with a certain degree of zest, as subjects for curiosity, as mere spectacles to excite our passion. We are not only guilty of great waste, in failing to economise every single opportunity of active benevolence, with which the system of Nature provides us; but we begin actually to delight in evil: and we too often palliate the crime by reference to our acute sensibilities, and compound for the selfishness of our actions, by the ardent benevolence of our hearts. It was such a philosopher as this, if the term be not grossly prostituted in its application to such a melancholy compound of vanity, timidity, and vice, who embraced the whole world in the expansion of his affections, and sent his own children to the hospital. And it is a similar spirit of mere theatrical benevolence, full of show, and trickery, and selfishness, which is rapidly stealing upon us in the present day; and which, a wise man will struggle to crush, lest it substitute poetry for reality, and swallow up all our noblest instincts under the guise of philosophical charity."

Now this extract includes, in our opinion, a very great proportion of our popular writers, and more especially the lady portion: and the lady-like gentlemen of the kid-glove school. And yet we daily see these praised," and that highly," although they are, according to our notions, producing the very worst possible results on the minds of their besotted readers. Modern fiction takes the form of narrative, as the elder did the dramatic. The library-table and the room of the public institution occupy the place of the theatre. Humanity will be amused, will be interested, and pedantry can never make a nation literary. The lighter geniuses, therefore, that by the nimbleness of their faculties, the fire of their energies and the strength of their imaginative conceptions, interest and excite thousands, who would seek other stimuli, did these not exist-are very important, a very valuable element of modern society. But then they may work to evil as well as good; and when they seek more to excite than inform, they degrade their high office, and become injurious. They perhaps may not be morally guilty, because many writers of fiction think that to move the feelings is to purify them. And perhaps they may have for their authority the much quoted, and equally much disputed canon of Aristotle, that the poet should purge the feelings by the excitement of pity and terror. Now modern criticism and modern genius has, to a great extent moderated, if not altogether discarded, this principle. In very barbarous and savage states, strong appeals might strike terror; enthusiasm would (and still may) be highly excited to some one impulsive deed. The Greeks, the Gauls, the Celts, and even the more sluggish Teutones might all be roused by the energy of such appeals. But such direct effects are not consonant with modern literature, nor with universal results. Guilty creatures sitting at a play" are not, as a general rule, struck into a confessional remorse. The play of "The Gamester" has no effect on an habitual black-leg. Napoleon would not have been restrained in his ambition by seeing Talma in "Macbeth." The moral disorders leading to habitual crime are chronic; and are not to be affected, much less removed by the purga

tion of the momentary feelings. They are the result of a disordered intellect as well as of an ossified heart; and can only be cured, if curable at all, by a slow process that shall awake, revive, or recall the dormant energies of both head and heart. "To expend and waste our feelings upon high-wrought and imaginary distresses," tends, indeed, to harden our hearts against the real miseries and discomforts of life, making them appear cold and endurable. The beneficial effect of literature, like the beneficial effects of all nature, acts, as we have often urged, by secondary causes; it must penetrate into the spirit; undergo a process of digestion; and be received into the moral system, before it can give health, vigour, and activity to the soul. The sentimental style is a mere topical, external, superficial application; that does more harm than good. It excites, irritates, and disturbs the sensations; creates a morbid desire for provocatives; and in the end substitutes a love for stimulants; entirely obliterating the natural and endurable powers of the sympathies. The True-or perhaps as more antithetical to the Sentimental-the Moral (taking that word in its more primitive sense as illustrative of human nature generally)-exemplifies itself in totally different results. Its great aim is to enlarge the spirit, by conveying the experience of one mind to another. It thus elevates and invigorates the spiritual frame; obliterates notions that were individually or socially injurious; regulates, not the particular but the general impulses of the passions; enlarges the sphere of the sympathies; fortifying them by the infusion of intellect; and raises up a system of self-guidance that, to use the trite but just expression, makes the student a wiser and a better man. Better because he is wiser.

All this may be thought a somewhat prolix introduction to Miss Jewsbury's novel. But the object of our notices has ever been to test the effect of the works examined: to see if they promote the love of the good, the beautiful, and the wise. We test with considerable anxieties the edibles for the body; why not those of the mind? Works of genius have no dull intermediate course: they work for extensive evil or extensive good. And never in the whole course of the human race, was it more important to regulate the mental diet of mankind: now that the fast producing engine throws off its hundreds of thousands of sheets-wholesome or deleterious, as the case may be.

Miss Jewsbury's last work we consider to be deserving the utmost attention. The pungency of her style, the penetration of her observation, the nobility (we had almost said) the manliness of her sentiments, entitle her to great consideration. She has the power, the fervour of genius. That is, she has an active operating spirit, that exerts and asserts itself. She has a spirit that is lively, and delights in activity; and that is in unison with the energy of the age. She is less an artist than a poetess. She is inspired (or rather we would say inspirited) more than she is modelled. Her mind, her senses, her soul, are of great perfection, and she utters their united results, rather than, by ratiocination or imitation making new forms out of common-place notions.

It is the perfection of these natural powers that makes her so true in the delineation of passion; it is these highly developed powers that enable her to pourtray, with what we feel is indisputable truth, processes of the soul and feelings, which experience cannot have supplied her with and which, if it could, would only have produced an abortive reality, that might have the value of a fact but not of a principle.

Miss Jewsbury is a genius. A clumsy method is this (we feel) of enunciating the powers of a great writer. The word genius is comprehensive, but vague; and by it, we would imply that power which enlightens and enlarges the human spirit, by making the qualities and processes of the soul more easily appreciable by those not so gifted. She is not a sentimentalist. The end of her writing is not mere excitement. It is to convey her spiritual experiences, and her observation of human nature and existence. In doing this she has grace and power to stimulate the feelings; because human nature sympathises largely with its kind: kind being but an extension of self. But she does not (as most novel writers do) transpose the effect for the cause, and, seeking only to interest, neglect to inform. She is not, however, entirely pure in this matter; and the latter part of her book is, we regret to say, too much engaged with the mere story. Doubtless it is hard, after a genuine interest has been created in the various beings of her imagination, to abandon them; but we must think the merely continuing their history, without new developments of character, is not in keeping with the first and only object of great writing, and of the first portion of her own work. Hamlet and Lear are characteristic to the last. Mr. Tate certainly thought otherwise, and opened a vista, where Lear could be seen seated in a comfortable arm-chair, taking gruel from the delicate hands of Cordelia. The great master, however, knew as well when and how to drop the curtain as he did to raise it. There is so much power in Miss Jewsbury's writings that we feel annoyed when she abandons its exercise, merely to be pleasing. It is her very power that stands in the way of her universal popularity. Her war is with convention, as far as it stands in opposition to the development of the natural powers and feelings. She is not apparently so politically as morally opposed to the assumptions of convention. She particularly demands the enlargement of the sphere of woman's activities; and her story is framed to elucidate the happier effects produced, both socially and individually, by the full development of the mental powers and affections of women. She has therefore chosen to delineate the histories of two women: the one, brought up with every conventional advantage, the child of wealthy manufacturers, married also to one distinguished for his success, sense, and abilities; the other, a foreign girl, starting in life as a horse-rider and ending as a noble artist: commanding the homage of rank and talent. The child of convention is a prey to morbid sympathies, and dies a maddened victim to her own ill-directed and weakened mind. The child moulded by circumstances turns out a noble self-governed successful woman-triumphant even over woman's last weakness: an early passion. In the management of this moral,

the authoress has incidentally shown great powers, and fallen into some errors. Her primary object is to prove her case; and in doing this she occasionally strains her conclusions. She is of too just and noble a nature to misrepresent, to obtain a mean and only apparent triumph, by artful misrepresentation. But she inadvertently, in the ardour of her faith, violates the fine knowledge she possesses of the heart and its infinite emotions. Bianca becomes occasionally too much the creature of her imagination-a model too fine for imitation, and too remote for example. As far as the delineation of character goes, (and she is strong in this greatest of qualifications) Alice is by far the most ably drawn. It is a picture finely designed and exquisitely shadowed. In the other characters there is much that is very cleverly and closely delineated; especially the sentimental, sensual Conrad; the deep, silent, undemonstrative Bryant; and his sister, outlined by a few random inuendoes. Mrs. Helmsby, a woman created a housekeeper, is also marvellously true to her own nature, to which she seems bound by some indissoluble power. Occasionally it seems inevitable but that some feeling or passion should carry it out of its usual narrow limits; but with the slightest possible commotion it settles into its inevitable common-place. It is not, however, in the delineation of character, though in that she is powerful, that Miss Jewsbury excels; it is in the infinite variety of illustration of the feelings and emotions that she is superior to all other female writers we have met with. We many of us have endured them, but few have been able to transfix them in such apt and potent words. They are in these volumes mapped with admirable precision, and frequently enunciated with equal wit as force. Indeed, Miss Jewsbury must be classed amongst the wits: and only wants the indignation to be a great satirist. The absurdities of conventionality are dandled with the power that a cat exhibits to its petty prey. We laugh, and at the same time feel a contemptuous kind of pity, for the perpetrators of such follies. Her style, too, is admirable; its principal force consisting of a peculiar and delicate kind of antithesis, which she manages in a manner peculiarly her own; her lively fancy furnishing her with endless illustrations. We shall endeavour to give a few examples of this: leaving the story and more philosophical parts to be sought by the reader himself.

HUMAN PRAYERS.

"Prayer is the great consolation of men in religion; but it is a merey that the hearing and granting of it is placed in the hands of the Highest, and quite beyond man's control,-for who can look back on his past life without trembling, when he thinks on the mad and fatal petitions he has offered up, and reflects on what must have been his destiny had they been granted!"

ADVICE.

"No satisfactory result ever comes of either giving or taking advice. What in one man would be a wise and natural mode of conduct, in another, even in similar circumstances, is forced, hard, and altogether unsuitable. So every man would do well to follow his own sincere instinct; that which

in his inmost soul he feels it right to do. When a man asks advice on a point of right or wrong, there is a warp, a bias, towards which he desires to be impelled, and he asks counsel for the sake of lessening his own responsibility."

REASONABILITY versus FEELING.

"He wrote, to tell her that he could not bring her to England:-it was a letter just to drive the person mad to whom it was addressed, whilst a third party seeing it, would have declared it an excellent, kind, reasonable letter. There it is! If there be one thing more utterly insupportable than another in this world, it is to receive reasonableness and kindness at the hands of one from whom we expect love, given as a substitute for love. Poor Theresa, not being a reasonable woman, never attempted to reply to this letter. Á handsome sum of money was paid to an Italian banker for her use, and her brother, who resided in a small Italian seaport, took her to live with him. Her child was about two months old; when the letter came, it had been named Bianca; and now her whole idea seemed to be to bring it up carefully and to carry it to England to claim its father, when it should be old enough. This idea kept her from destroying herself in the first frenzy of her grief-but her faculties gradually declined; the memory of her desertion died away; and the idea of taking the little Bianca to its father filled her heart alone.

"Phillip Helmsby knew nothing of all this; perhaps, had he done so, he might have acted differently—but there is no telling."

A FEW APHORISMS AND OBSERVATIONS.

"In this world men cannot resist the temptation of making money when they have an opportunity, or turning aside from a bargain; but there is a great deal of good-nature for all that."

"There are so many more accidental things in this world than premeditated ones!"

"The idealism of her profession had struck her, and henceforth it was not the unmixed drudgery it had been."

"People can only take in from surrounding influences what they have an affinity to receive."

"She had the sensibility of genius without its creative power; she had not force enough to break through the rough husk of her actual life and assert her inner soul; she had not the gift of utterance in any way, and the life was almost choked out of her by the rank, over-fed, material prosperity which surrounded her."

"The exquisite taste which presided in the arrangement of the rooms, had subdued the richness of the decorations; the sense of their expensiveness was lost, and no thought of the upholsterer's bill was suggested by them."

"A woman's first impulse is always to dress for her lover."

"There are moments in the experience of most people, which come unthought of, unlooked for, bringing a gush of deep joy that is like pain in its intensity-it is almost a pang of ecstacy."

"Under the extenuating name of 'business,' there lies a debatable ground between honesty and roguery, amenable to its own laws of morality, and understanding no other."

"The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman,' and therefore we do not believe he ever made the noted saying attributed to him, that 'It is better