Her

boundary. The painful remembrances of the matchless in their kind. Never was so much former interferes with our interest for the of the terrific alleviated by so much of the latter, and the present difficulties of the last pitiful. The incidents are most tragic; yet deprive us of those emotions of fond retro- over them is diffused a breath of sweetness, spection, which the fate of the first would which softens away half their anguish, and otherwise awaken. Still there are in this tale reconciles us to that which remains. Our scenes of pathos delicious as any which even minds are prepared, long before, for the early the author himself has drawn. The tender nipping of that delicate blossom, for which pleasure which the Man of Feeling excites is this world was too bleak. Julia's last interwholly without alloy. Its hero is the most view with Savillon mitigates her doom, partly beautiful personification of gentleness, pa- by the joy her heart has tasted, and which tience, and meek sufferings, which the heart nothing afterwards in life could equal, and can conceive. Julia de Roubigné, however, is, partly by the certainty that she must either on the whole, the most delightful of the au- become guilty or continue wretched. Nothing thor's works. There is, in this tale, enough of can be at once sweeter and more affecting plot to keep alive curiosity, and sharpen the than her ecstatic dream after she has taken interest which the sentiment awakens, without the fatal mixture, her seraphical playing on any of those strange turns and perplexing the organ, to which the waiting angels seem incidents which break the current of sympa- to listen, and her tranquil recalling the scenes thy. The diction is in perfect harmony with of peaceful happiness with her friend, as she the subject-"most musical, most melan-imagines her arms about her neck, and fancies choly" with "golden cadences" responsive that her Maria's tears are falling on her boto the thoughts. There is a plaintive charm som. Then comes Montaubon's description in the image presented to us of the heroine, of her as she drank the poison :-"She took too fair almost to dwell on. How exquisite is it from me smiling, and her look seemed to the description given of her by her maid, in a lose its confusion. She drank my health! letter to her friend, relating to her fatal mar- She was dressed in her white silk bed-gown, riage:" She was dressed in a white muslin ornamented with pale, pink ribands. night-gown, with striped lilac and white cheek was gently flushed from their reflection; ribands; her hair was kept in the loose way her blue eyes were turned upwards as she you used to make me dress it for her at Bel- drank, and a dark-brown ringlet lay on her ville, with two waving curls down one side shoulder." We do not think even the fate of of her neck, and a braid of little pearls. And "the gentle lady married to the Moor" calls to be sure, with her dark, brown locks resting forth tears so sweet as those which fall for the upon it, her bosom looked as pure white as Julia of Mackenzie! the driven snow. And then her eyes, when she gave her hand to the count! they were cast down, and you might see her eyelashes, like strokes of a pencil, over the white of her skin-the modest gentleness, with a sort of sadness too, as it were, and a gentle heave of her bosom at the same time." And yet, such is the feeling communicated to us by the whole work, that we are ready to believe even this artless picture an inadequate representation of that beauty which we never cease to feel. How natural and tear-moving is the letter of Savillon to his friend, describing the scenes of his early love, and recalling, with intense vividness, all the little circumstances which aided its progress! What an idea, in a single expression, does Julia give of the depth and the tenderness of her affection, when describing herself as taking lessons in drawing from her lover, she says that she felt" shall hang upon the beatings of their hearts," something from the touch of his hand "not the less delightful from carrying a sort of fear along with that delight: it was like a pulse in the soul!" The last scenes of this novel are

We rejoice to know and feel that these delicious tales cannot perish. Since they were written, indeed, the national imagination has been, in a great degree, perverted by strong excitements, and "fed on poisons till they have become a kind of nutriment." But the quiet and unpresuming beauties of these works depend not on the fashion of the world. They cannot be out of date till the dreams of young imagination shall vanish, and the deepest sympathies of love and hope shall be chilled for ever. While other works are extolled, admired, and reviewed, these will be loved and wept over. Their author, in the evening of his days, may truly feel that he has not lived in vain. Gentle hearts shall ever blend their thought of him among their remembrances of the benefactors of their youth. And when the fever of the world

how often will their spirits turn to him, who, as he cast a soft seriousness over the morning of life, shall assist in tranquillizing its noontide sorrows!

"THE AUTHOR OF WAVERLEY."

Here are we in a bright and breathing world.-Wordsworth.

[NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.]

WE esteem the productions which the great | the spirit of gladness. There is little of a medinovelist of Scotland has poured forth with tative or retrospective cast in his works. startling speed from his rich treasury, not Whatever age he chooses for his story, lives only as multiplying the sources of delight to before us: we become contemporaries of all thousands, but as shedding the most genial his persons, and sharers in all their fortunes. influences on the taste and feeling of the peo-Of all men who have ever written, excepting ple. These, with their fresh spirit of health, Shakspeare, he has perhaps the least of exhave counteracted the workings of that blast- clusiveness, the least of those feelings which ing spell by which the genius of Lord Byron keep men apart from their kind. He has his once threatened strangely to fascinate and de- own predilections-and we love him the better base the vast multitude of English readers. for them, even when they are not ours-but Men, seduced by their noble poet, had begun they never prevent him from grasping with to pay homage to mere energy, to regard vir- cordial spirit all that is human. His tolerance tue as low and mean compared with lofty is the most complete, for it extends to adverse crime, and to think that high passion carried bigotries; his love of enjoyment does not in itself a justification for its most fearful ex- exclude the ascetic from his respect, nor does cesses. He inspired them with feeling of his fondness for hereditary rights and timediseased curiosity to know the secrets of dark honoured institutions prevent his admiration bosoms, while he opened his own perturbed of the fiery zeal of a sectary. His genius spirit to their gaze. His works, and those im- shines with an equal light on all-illuminating ported from Germany, tended to give to our the vast hills of purple heath, the calm breast imagination an introspective cast, to perplex of the quiet water, and the rich masses of the it with metaphysical subtleties, and to render grove-now gleaming with a sacred light on our poetry "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of the distant towers of some old monastery, thought." The genius of our country was now softening the green-wood shade, now thus in danger of being perverted from its piercing the gloom of the rude cave where purest uses to become the minister of vain the old Covenanter lies-free and universal, philosophy, and the anatomist of polluted and bounteous as the sun-and pouring its radiance with a like impartiality "upon a living and rejoicing world."

natures.

consider his powers in general of natural description-of skill in the delineation of character-and of exciting high and poetical interest, by the gleams of his fancy, the tragic elevation of his scenes, and the fearful touches which he delights to borrow from the world of spirits.

"The author of Waverley" (as he delights to be styled) has weaned it from its idols, and We shall not attempt, in this slight sketch, restored to it its warm, youthful blood, and to follow our author regularly through all his human affections. Nothing can be more op-rich and varied creations; but shall rather posed to the gloom, the inward revolvings, and morbid speculations, which the world once seemed inclined to esteem as the sole prerogatives of the bard, than his exquisite creations. His persons are no shadowy abstractions-no personifications of a dogmano portraits of the author varied in costume, but similar in features. With all their rich In the vivid description of natural scenery varieties of character, whether their heroical our author is wholly without a rival, unless spirit touches on the godlike, or their wild Sir Walter Scott will dispute the pre-eminence eccentricities border on the farcical, they are with him; and, even then, we think the novelmen fashioned of human earth, and warm ist would be found to surpass the bard. The with human sympathies. He does not seek free grace of nature has, of late, contributed for the sublime in the mere intensity of burn- little to the charm of our highest poetry. Lord ing passion, or for sources of enjoyment in Byron has always, in his reference to the mathose feverish gratifications which some would jestic scenery of the universe, dealt rather in teach us to believe the only felicities worthy grand generalities than minute pictures, has of high and impassioned souls. He writes used the turbulence of the elements as symeverywhere with a keen and healthful relish bols of inward tempests, and sought the vast for all the good things of life-constantly re- solitudes and deep tranquillity of nature, but freshes us where we least expected it, with a to assuage the fevers of the soul. Wordsworth sense of that pleasure which is spread through-who, amidst the contempt of the ignorant the earth "to be caught in stray gifts by who- and of the worldly wise, has been gradually ever will find," and brightens all things with and silently moulding all the leading spirits

less youth, and to bear without shrinking the the most part, of a far deeper cast;-flowing keenest of mortal agonies. In the fierce and from his intense consciousness of the mysteries hunted child of the mist-in the daring and of our nature, and constantly impressing on reckless libertine Staunton-in the fearful our minds the high sanctities and the mortal Elspeth-in the vengeful wife of M'Gregor- destiny of our being. No one has ever made. are traits of wild and irregular greatness, frag- so impressive a use of the solemnities of life ments of might and grandeur, which show and death-of the awfulness which rests over how noble and sacred a thing the heart of man the dying, and renders all their words and acis, in spite of its strangest debasements and tions sacred-or of the fond retrospection, and perversions. How does the inimitable portrait the intense present enjoyment, snatched fearof Claverhouse at first excite our hatred for fully as if to secure it from fate, which are the that carelessness of human misery, that con- peculiar blessings of a short and uncertain extempt for the life of his fellows, that cold hau- istence. Was ever the robustness of life-the teur and finished indifference which are so mantling of the strong current of joyous blood vividly depicted;—and yet how does his mere-the high animation of health, spirits, and a soldierly enthusiasm redeem him at last, and almost persuade us that the honour and fame of such a man were cheaply purchased by a thousand lives! We can scarcely class Rob Roy among these mingled characters. He has nothing but the name and the fortune of an outlaw and a robber. He is, in truth, one of the noblest of heroes-a Prince of the hether and the rock-whose very thirst for vengeance is tempered and harmonized by his fondness for the wild and lovely scenes of his home. Indeed the influences of majestic scenery are to be perceived tinging the rudest minds which the author has made to expatiate amidst its solitudes. The passions even of Burley and of Macbriar borrow a grace from the steep crags, the deep masses of shade, and the silent caves, among which they were nurtured, as the most rapid and perturbed stream which rushes through a wild and romantic region bears some reflection of noble imagery on its impetuous surface. To some of his less stern but unlettered personages, nature seems to have been a kindly instructor, nurturing high thoughts within them, and well supplying to them all the lack of written wisdom. The wild sublimity of Meg Merrilies is derived from her long converse with the glories of creation; the floating clouds have lent to her something of their grace; she has contemplated the rocks till her soul is firm as they, and gazed intently on the face of nature until she has become half acquainted with its mysteries. The old king's beadman has not journeyed for years in vain among the hills and woods; their beauty has sunk into his soul; and his days seem bound each to each by “natural piety," which he has learned among them.

stout heart, more vividly brought before the mind than in the description of Frank Kennedy's demeanour as he rides lustily forth, never to return?-or the fearful change from this hearty enjoyment of life to the chillness of mortality, more deeply impressed on the imagination than in all the minute examinations of the scene of his murder, the traces of the deadly contest, the last marks of the struggling footsteps, and the description of the corpse at the foot of the crag? Can a scene of mortality be conceived more fearful than that where Bertram, in the glen of Dernclugh, witnesses the last agonies of one over whom Meg Merrilies is chanting her wild ditties to soothe the passage of the spirit? What a stupendous scene is that of the young fisher's funeral-the wretched father writhing in the contortions of agony-the mother silent in tender sorrow-the motley crowd assembled to partake of strange festivity—and the old grandmother fearfully linking the living to the dead, now turning her wheel in apathy and unconsciousness, now drinking with frightful mirth to many "such merry meetings," now, to the astonishment of the beholders, rising to comfort her son, and intimating with horrid solemnity that there was more reason to mourn for her than for the departed! Equal in terrific power, is the view given us of the last confession and death of that "awful woman"-her intense perception of her long past guilt, with her deadness to all else her yet quenchless hate to the object of her youthful vengeance, animating her frame with unearthly fire-her dying fancies that she is about to follow her mistress, and the broken images of old grandeur which fit before her as she perishes. That we think there is much of true poeti- These things are conceived in the highest cal genius-much of that which softens, re-spirit of tragedy, which makes life and death fines, and elevates humanity in the works of meet together, which exhibits humanity stripthis author-may be inferred from our remarks ped of its accidents in all its depth and height, on his power of imbodying human character. which impresses us at once with the victory The gleams of a soft and delicate fancy are of death, and of the eternity of those energies tenderly cast over many of their scenes which it appears to subdue. There are also heightening that which is already lovely, re- in these works, situations of human interest lieving the gloomy, and making even the thin as strong as ever were invented-attended too blades of barren regions shine refreshingly on with all that high apparel of the imagination, the eyes. We occasionally meet with a pure which renders the images of fear and anguish and pensive beauty, as in Pattieson's descrip- majestical. Such is that scene in the lone tion of his sensations in his evening walks house after the defeat of the Covenanters, after the feverish drudgery of his school-where Morton finds himself in the midst of a with wild yet graceful fantasies, as in the songs of Davie Gellatly-or with visionary and aerial shapes, like the spirit of the House of Avenel. But the poetry of this author is, for

band of zealots, who regard him as given by God into their hands as a victim-where he is placed before the clock to gaze on the advances of the hand to the hour when he is to be slain,

B

amidst the horrible devotion of his foes. The whole scene is, we think, without an equal in the conceptions which dramatic power has been able to imbody. Its startling unexpectedness, yet its perfect probability to the imagination-the high tone and wild enthusiasm of character in the murderers-the sacrificial cast of their intended deed in their own raised and perverted thoughts-the fearful view given to the bodily senses of their prisoner of his remaining moments by the segment of the circle yet to be traversed by the finger of the clock before him, enable us to participate in the workings of his own dizzy soul, as he stands "awaiting till the sword destined to slay him crept out of its scabbard gradually, and, as it were by straw-breadths," and condemned to drink the bitterness of death “drop by drop," while his destined executioners seem "to alter their forms and features like the spectres in a feverish dream; their features become larger and their faces more disturbed;" until the beings around him appear actually demons, the walls seem to drop with blood, and "the light tick of the clock thrills on his ear with such loud, painful distinctness, as if each sound were the prick of a bodkin inflicted on the naked nerve of the organ." The effect is even retrospectively heightened by the heroic deaths of the Covenanters immediately succeeding, which give a dignity and a consecration to their late terrific design. The trial and execution of Fergus Mac Ivor are also, in the most exalted sense of the term, tragical. They are not only of breathless interest from the external circumstances, nor of moral grandeur from the heroism of Fergus and his follower, but of poetic dignity from that power of imagination which renders for a time the rules of law sublime as well as fearful, and gives to all the formalities of a trial more than a judicial majesty. It is seldom, indeed, that the terrors of our author offend or shock us, because they are accompanied by that reconciling power which softens without breaking the current of our sympathies. But there are some few instances of unrelieved horror-or of anguish, which overmasters fantasy-as the strangling of Glossin by Dirk Haiteraich, the administering of the torture to Macbriar, and the bloody bridal of Lammermuir. If we compare these with the terrors of Burley in his cave-where with his naked sword in one hand and his Bible in the other, he wrestles with his own remorse, believing it, in the spirit of his faith, a fiend of Satan-and with the sinking of Ravenswood in the sands; we shall feel how the grandeur of religious thought in the first instance, and the stately scenery of nature and the air of the supernatural in the last, ennoble agony, and render horrors grateful to the soul.

ness-to present it to us in the noblest masses; yet to make us spectators of each individual circumstance of interest in the field, may excite the envy of a painter. We know of nothing resembling those delineations in history or romance, except the descriptions given by Thucydides of the blockade of Platea, of the Corcyræan massacres, of the attempt to retake Epipolæ in the night, of the great naval action before Syracuse, of all the romantic events of the Sicilian war, and the varied miseries of the Athenian army in their retreat under Nicias. In the life and spirit, and minuteness of the details-in the intermingling of allusions to the scenery of the contests-and in the general fervour breathed over the whole, there is a remarkable resemblance between these passages of the Greek historian, and the narratives of Scottish contests by the author of Waverley. There is, too, the same patriotic zeal in both; though the feeling in the former is of a more awful and melancholy cast, and that of the latter more light and cheerful. The Scottish novelist may, like the noblest histo rians, boast that he has given to his country "Kтμ es is”—a possession for ever!

It remains that we should say a word on the use made of the supernatural in these romances. There is, in the mode of its employment, more of gusto―more that approaches to an actual belief in its wonders, than in the works of any other author of these incredulous times. Even Shakspeare himself, in his remote age, does not appear to have drank in so deeply the spirit of superstition as our novelist of the nineteenth century. He treats, indeed, all the fantasies of his countrymen with that spirit of allowance and fond regard with which he always touches on human emotions. But he does not seem to have heartily partaken in them as awful realities. His witches have power to excite wonder, but little to chill men's bloods. Ariel, the visions of Prospero's enchanted isle, the "quaint fairies and the dapper elves" of the Midsummer Night's Dream glitter on the fancy, in a thousand shapes of dainty loveliness, but never affect us otherwise than as creations of the poet's brain. Even the ghost in Hamlet does not appal us half so fearfully as many a homely tale which has nothing to recommend it but the earnest belief of its tremulous reciter. There is little magic in the web of life, notwithstanding all the variety of its shades, as Shakspeare has drawn it. Not so is it with our author; his spells have manifest hold on himself, and, therefore, they are very potent with the spirits of his readers. No prophetic intimation in his works is ever suffered to fail. The spirit which appears to Fergus-the astronomical predictions of Guy Mannering the eloquent curses, and more eloquent blessings, of Meg Merrilies-the dying denunciation of Mucklewrath-the old pro

We must not pass over, without due acknowledgment, the power of our author in the description of battles, as exhibited in his pic-phecy in the Bride of Lammermuir-all are tures of the engagement at Preston Pans, of fulfilled to the very letter. The high and the first skirmish with the Covenanters, in joyous spirits of Kennedy are observed by one which they overcome Claverhouse, and of the of the bystanders as intimations of his speedy battle in which they were, in turn, defeated. fate. We are far from disapproving of these The art by which he contrives at once to give touches of the super-human, for they are the mortal contest in all its breadth and vast-made to blend harmoniously with the freshest