wood, Rushbrook, has conceived the most ardent passion for the Lady Matilda, his cousin; and sees himself equally destroyed with his uncle, by its avowal or denial. In the mean time, one of those depraved boobies, devoted to the pleasures of the chace, and any other game that the country affords, who scatter their vices in the abodes of innocence, and conceive a title and an estate to be warrant enough for any wickedness, having fancied the lovely girl thus driven within his reach, determines to bear her off, and treat her as he pleases when she shall be in his power. Certain dissolute companions of this Lord Margrave, by a stratagem, get her into their hands, and bear her off from the humble guardians about her. They are seen and followed by a very steady man, a tenant of Lord Elmwood's, who, past the fear of consequences, hastens back into the presence of her father, and informs him that his child has been carried off by Lord Margrave. Lord Elmwood heard the latter part of the fellow's explanation with a seeming composure, and then turning hastily to Rushbrook, said,

"Where are my pistols, Harry?' Sandford started from his seat, seized his hand, and cried out to his 6 • Will patron, you then prove yourself a father?' Lord Elmwood only answered, and left the room."

yes!'

Cold, sullen, and dark, like a flint, this man was sure to lacerate every thing that tried his

edge, and never emit one kindly spark unless violently struck.

He recovers his daughter from the spoiler, and his own heart from the wretched purgatory he had wound about it. Rushbrook's destiny is placed in the hands of Lady Matilda, and the reader is left to imagine a happiness that is to suffer no blight, attendant upon minds well disciplined by past misfortunes.

We confess we were really astonished when we read the premonition on our return to the characters in the second part of the novel. "The beautiful, the beloved Miss Milner, is no longer beautiful, no longer beloved, no longer--tremble while you read it! no longer virtuous!" Nor does the moral of the magician, in the last page of her work, tend in the slightest degree to reconcile us to such a change. "Mr. Milner had better have given his fortune to a distant branch of his family, so that he had given to his daughter a proper education." This then is the great panacea, that is to remove all the temptations of youth, and beauty, and passion, and govern and guide the fair vessel with safety on its voyage, through a stormy ocean to a deceitful coast. How did it succeed with Dorriforth? under the tuition of the ablest of all disciplinarians, a member of the idly censured college of Jesuits-men who, in the new world

followed the ravaging steps of Cortes and Pizarro, and healed the wounds, nay, almost obliterated the scars, of their insolent domination. "You may remember," says Lord Elmwood to the venerable Sandford, "how troublesome it was to conquer my stubborn disposition in my youth; then indeed you did, but in my more advanced age, you would find the task too difficult." What finished seminaries have ever secured the virtue of the fashionable world? Would the establishments of any of Mrs. Inchbald's rivals in romance have guaranteed the lively and generous disposition of Miss Milner from the effects of besetting circumstance and betraying self-love? No: there is no safety, but in the moral approbation of the society in which we live: let it never truckle to vice, and the countenance it denies to all impurity shall be the Ægis of Minerva, to preserve virtue immaculate.

We conceive, however, Mrs. Inchbald here to be following another precedent. In a fragment, which in our youth almost broke our hearts, Rousseau, we remember, chose to exhibit his Sophia as avilie; and Emilius passes a night of breathless agony at the door of her apartment, conscious of her degradation. We have never had nerve enough to inquire for it since; but as Mrs. Inchbald studied, and began a translation of a later work, his Confessions,' in 1790, it is more than pro

bable the fragment alluded to decided her sequel to the Simple Story.'

To throw her work so much into dialogue, as she has done, was, we should imagine, not so much the result of critical judgment as of professional bias; she was an actress, and her mind was stored with conversational oppositions of sentiment, and sallies of humour or character. We do not mean that judgment did not approve her course, suggested as it was by habit. Some great masters of romance have been led to prefer the dialogue form, as giving a smarter and more vivid glow to the business of their narrative; among whom, Richardson is unquestionably the most excellent. As his works are in the epistolary form, he has only to make his correspondents proud of the praise given to their fidelity of detail, and take care (no difficult matter) that the dialogue is at least as intelligent and interesting as the language of the modern stage. The characters in Richardson do the whole, either as speakers or reporters, and the author never in person appears to address the reader, though he is the father of all the minds which he brings into action. Mrs. Inchbald's plan allows her occasionally, as the author, "to point her moral and adorn her tale;"

and she avails herself with great skill of the combined advantages.

In the above observations, we have rather inclined to give the impression of a recent perusal upon our own minds, than the opinions of critics who wrote when the work first appeared. In those days, novels came into the short articles of the two great reviews, the Monthly and the Critical;' and the reading public was contented with less copious extracts, than it has now become the practice to make in even the Weekly Journals. But she had excited so much notice on the stage, as a respectable woman and a powerful dramatist, and had attracted so wide a circle of intelligent and zealous friends, that the Simple Story' made its way to every heart, and the author was ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex.

VOL. I.

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