of the citizen with the vigour of the government? But we have, it seems, no historian, like Robertson; no lecturer, like Blair; no philosophers, like Smith and Paley; no orators, like Fox and Burke and Sheridan; no mechanics, like Arkwright and Watts; no painters, like Wilkie and Laurence; and no poets, like Scott, Campbell, Byron, and Moore. It is singular enough, in speaking of an American generation actually existing, and of Britons with whom to compare it, that a reference to the dead should have been principally relied on. What if we retort the statement, and ask-does Britain now furnish an historian, like Robertson? a lecturer, like Blair? philosophers, like Smith and Paley? or orators, like Fox, Burke, and Sheridan? &c. In this view of the subject, our critics may not be less embarrassed than ourselves; for if the heroic in morals and character' has never yet arisen in the United States, it has long since expired in Great Britain: And our common pride must hereafter be, that we sprung from the same race, with Bacon and Shakspeare and Newton.' Ed. L. & S. R.]

[From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.-Feb. 1820.]

ART. VIII.-ON THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

AND WASHINGTON IRVING.

AN American critica complains, that the productions of American genius are never received as they ought to be by the people of England, that a certain strange mixture of haughtiness, jealousy, and indifference, is manifested on every occasion when any American author forms the subject of professional criticism in Britain,while, to our reading public at large, even the names of some men whose writings do the highest honour to the language in which they are written, remain at this moment entirely unknown. In so far, we are free to confess, that we think our countrymen do lie open to this last reproach. The great names of which we are ignorant, cannot indeed be numerous, for few American writers are ever talked of, even by Mr. Walsh or the North American Review itself, with whom we think people on this side the water are less acquainted than they ought to be. In truth, so far as we know, there are two American authors only whose genius has reason to complain of British neglect—and with a very great deal of reason both unquestionably may do so-namely, CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN and WASHINGTON IRVING.

The first of these has been dead for several years; and the periodical works, by his contributions to which he was best known in America during his lifetime, have long since followed him but his name yet lives, although not as it ought to do, in his novels.

a [In No. 25 of the North American Review.]

The earliest and the best of them, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly, are to be found in every circulating library, both in America and England; but notwithstanding the numbers who must thus have read them, and the commendations they have received from some judges of the highest authority, (above all from Godwin, whose manner their author imitated in a noble style of imitation,)-they are never mentioned among the classical or standard works of that species of composition. It is wonderful how much of thought, power, invention, and genius, are for ever travelling their cold unworthy rounds between the shelves of circulating libraries, and the tables or pillows of habitual novelreaders. The works of Brown, and of many other writers, scarcely his inferiors, are perused day after day, and year after year, by boys and girls, and persons of all ages, whose minds are incapable of discriminating the nature or merits of the food they devour, without being read once in many years by any one who has either judgment or imagination to understand while he is reading them, or memory to retain the smallest impression of their contents after he has laid them aside; while some fortunate accident not unfrequently elevates, for a considerable length of time, into every thing but the highest order of celebrity and favour, writings of the same species, entirely their inferiors in every quality that ought to command the public approbation. We earnestly recommend these novels of Brown to the attention of our readers. In all of them, but especially in Wieland, they will discern the traces of a very masterly hand. Brown was not indeed a Godwin; but he possessed much, very much, of the same dark mysterious power of imagination which is displayed in Caleb Williams, St. Leon, and Mandeville; much also of the same great author's deep and pathetic knowledge of the human heart; and much of his bold sweeping flood of impassioned eloquence. There are scenes in Wieland which he that has read them and understood them once, can never forget-touches which enter into the very core of the spirit, and leave their glowing traces there for ever behind them, Wild and visionary in his general views of human society, and reasoning and declaiming like a madman whenever the abuses of human power are the subjects on which he enlarges-in his perceptions of the beauty and fitness of all domestic virtues-in his fine sense of the delicacies of love, friendship, and all the tenderness, and all the heroism of individual souls,-he exhibits a strange example of the inconsistency of the human mind. The life of this strange man was a restless and unhappy one. were all dark and gloomy: and in reading his works, we cannot The thoughts in which he delighted help pausing every now and then, amidst the stirring and kindling

a

a [To a writer whose own moral and political sentiments disagree, the consistency of BROWN will of course appear inconsistency.]

excitements they afford, to reflect of what sleepless midnights of voluntary misery the impression is borne by pages, which few ever turn over, except for the purpose of amusing a few hours of listless or vicious indolence. It is thus that one of his own countrymen has lately spoken of his works:

"A writer so engrossed with the character of men, and the ways in which they may be influenced; chiefly occupied with the mind, turning every thing into thought, and refining upon it till it almost vanishes; might not be expected to give much time to descriptions of outward objects. But in all his tales, he shows great closeness and minuteness of observation. He describes as if he told only what he had seen, in a highly excited state of feeling, and in connexion with the events and characters. He discovers every where a strong sense of the presence of objects. Most of his descriptions are simple, and many might appear bald. He knew, perhaps, that some minds could be awakened by the mere mention of a waterfall, or of full orchards and cornfields,' or of the peculiar sound of the wind among the pines. We have alluded to the distinctiveness and particularity with which he describes the city visited with pestilence the dwelling-house, the hospital, the dying, the healed, all appear before our eyes-The imagination has nothing to do but perceive, though it never fails to multiply and enlarge circumstances of horror, and to fasten us to the picture more strongly, by increasing terror and sympathy till mere disgust ceases.

"The most formal and protracted description is in Edgar Huntly, of a scene in our western wilderness. We become acquainted with it by following the hero night and day, in a cold, drenching rain storm, or under the clear sky-through its dark caverns, recesses and woods-along its ridges and the river side. It produces throughout the liveliest sense of danger, and oppresses the spirits with an almost inexplicable sadness. Connected with it are incidents of savage warfare; the disturbed life of the frontier settler; the attack of the half-famished panther; the hero's lonely pursuit of a sleep-walker; and his own adventores when suffering under the same calamity. The question is not how much of this has happened, or is likely to happen; but is it felt? Are we, for the time, at the disposal of the writer, and can we never lose the impression that he leaves? Does it appear in its first freshness, when any thing occurs which a busy fancy can associate with it? Does it go with us into other deserts, and quicken our feelings and observation, till a familiar air is given to strange prospects? If so, the author is satisfied. To object that he is wild and improbable in his story is not enough, unless we can show that his intention failed, or was a bad

one.

Brown delights in solitude of all kinds. He loves to represent the heart as desolate-to impress you with the self-dependence of characters, plotting, loving, suspecting evil, devising good, in perfect secrecy. Sometimes, when he would exhibit strength of mind and purpose to most advantage, he takes away all external succour, even the presence of a friend, who might offer at least the support of his notice and sympa

thy. He surrounds a person with circumstances precisely fitted to weaken resolution, by raising vague apprehensions of danger, but incapable of producing so strong an excitement as to inspire desperate and inflexible energy. The mind must then fortify itself, calmly estimate the evil that seems to be approaching, and contemplate it in its worst forms and consequences, in order to counteract it effectually. He is peculiarly successful in describing a deserted house, silent and dark in the day time, while a faint ray streams through the crevices of the closed doors and shutters, discovering, in a peculiar twilight, that it had been once occupied, and that every thing remained undisturbed since its sudden desertion. The sentiment of fear and melancholy is perhaps never more lively, nor the disturbed fancy more active, than in such a place, even when we are strangers to it; but how much more if we have passed there through happiness and suffering; if the robber has alarmed our security, or if a friend has died there, and been carried over its threshold to the grave. The solemnity of our minds is not unlike that which we feel when walking alone on the seashore at night, or through dark forests by day; for here there is no decay, nothing that man had created, and which seems to mourn in his absence; there is rapture as well as awe in our contemplations, and more of devotion than alarm in our fear."

WASHINGTON IRVING, as yet a young man, and who is at this moment in London-is a man of a much more happy and genialorder of mind than Brown; and his works are much greater favourites amongst his own countrymen than the best of Brown's ever were. He is the sole author of the SKETCH BOOK-a periodical work, now in the course of publication at New-York; from which numerous extracts have appeared in the Literary Gazette, and in many of the Magazines; none of which, however, seem to have known from whose genius they were borrowing so largely. We are greatly at a loss to comprehend for what reason Mr. Irving has judged fit to publish his Sketch Book in America earlier than in Britain; but at all events he is doing himself great injustice by not having an edition printed here, of every Number, after it has appeared at New-York. Nothing has been written for a long time, for which it would be more safe to promise great and eager acceptance. The story of "Rip Van Winkle,"-the "Country Life in England," the account of his voyage across the Atlantic-and "the Broken Heart,"—are all, in their several ways, very exquisite and classical pieces of writing, alike honourable to the intellect and the heart of their author. Another sketch of the same class, we shall venture to quote from a later Number of this work, as we have not yet seen it extracted by any of our contemporaries.

[Here the Editor copies the whole story of " A ROYAL POET," from No. III. of the Sketch Book.]

The style in which this is written may be taken as a fair speci

men of Irving's more serious manner-it is, we think, very graceful-infinitely more so than any piece of American writing that ever came from any other hand, and well entitled to be classed with the best English writings of our day. There is a rich spirit of pensive elegance about the commencement, and every sentence that follows increases the effect. In some of the pieces of pure imaginative writing we have named above, the author strikes a deeper note, and with a no less masterly hand. He, too, has a strange power of mingling feelings of natural and visionary terror with those of a light and ludicrous kind-and the mode in which he uses this power is calculated to produce a very striking effect upon all that read with enthusiasm what is written with enthusiasm. He is one of the few whose privilege it is to make us "join trembling with our mirth.”

["THE COUNTRY CHURCH," furnishes the Editor with another quotation.]

Our limits prevent us from entering at present at greater length on the merits of Mr. Irving; but in our next Number we propose returning to him, and giving our readers some account of his largest and most masterly work, the History of New-York by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a singular production of genius, the existence of which is, we believe, almost entirely unknown on this side the Atlantic.

[We do not print this, because we esteem it for liberality. The same writer who would extol the genius he discovers in the Belles-lettres productions of Brown and of Irving, would deny to any of our distinguished public characters either scientific acquirement or political excellence or to any of our judiciary, wisdom or virtue. The following quotation from an article upon "The late king," in the same number of this Magazine, will give an idea of the Editor's sentiments.-The misstatement contained in the second sentence, suits the colour of his eulogium. He would allow us more merit in effecting our separation from the thrall of tyranny, than we claim ourselves. Ed. L. & S. R.]

"The American war formed the test at once of the monarch's principles and of his spirit. The universal voice of his people resented, in the first instance, the audacious pretensions, and the factious machinations of the revolted colonies; and the late king, when he frowned upon the infant seditions of his transatlantic subjects, appeared but as the index of the mind and soul of England. The chance of war declared indeed in favour of rebellion; but the most renowned of our modern statesmen-the man of the people-the illustrious advocate of popular rights, but the proud spirit also which spurned from it popular license with disdain, was the foremost to declare that the sovereignty of England over her rebel colonies ought never to be abandoned; and that, in the glorious struggle, it was her duty to nail the colours to the mast. It is well enough to say now, that it was not a limb but