of literature. Since the establishment of the Edinburgh Review, it has assumed the grave office of guarding and defending the rights and interests of mankind; and is rapidly acquiring a vast, and we believe, will ultimately acquire, a controlling influence, over the destinies of nations. For the splendid success of the Edinburgh Review led to the immediate establishment of numerous similar publications in England, France, Germany, Italy, and every civilized country. They are increasing. They have proved the able defenders of free principles-and now every gale that blows wafts to the four quarters of the globe triumphant exposures of abuse and eloquent appeals in favour of freedom. Let it not be said that Critical Literature may be made an engine of despotism as well as of freedom. Should despotism undertake to employ it in her cause, a conflict of opinion will immediately arise in the literary world; this will inevitably excite and enlighten general inquiry; and enlightened inquiry is the broad road to correct conclusions. In such a contest liberal principles have nothing to fear. Demosthenes won the argument, though Philip gained the battle. And here is the danger. The ignorance and rooted prejudices of mankind give their monarchs the control of the physical strength of society. Remove the cause, you remove the effect; and the physical, as well as moral and intellectual strength of society, will be on the side of freedom. Per Around the spot where Christ abode, Which speaks the joys of sin forgiven, And lifts the beaming eye to God; That holy calm where passion's rage, And earthly hope and fear are gone, While o'er the soul's brief pilgrimage, A softer radiance is thrown, That holy calm thy breast shall feel, As breaks the sabbath's dawn once more, And, to thine inmost soul, shall steal The presence of the Comforter. Around the throne already meet, Another Sabbath's sacred rest. Though high above our feeble aim, Rolls on their "unexpressive" song, Our souls, communion still shall claim, And mingle with the happy throng. On earth below, in heaven above, The peace, the joy, the praise are one ; And soon these souls from earth remove, Where naught but heaven remains alone. C. A. G. REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. A Peep at the Pilgrims in 1636. A Tale of Olden Times. By the Author of divers unfinished manuscripts, &c. Boston. We write this review for the special use andbenefit of two large classes of human kind;-novel-readers and novel-writers. And though we have sore misgivings that neither the one nor the other will be disposed to read, much less to regard the opinions of so grave and puritanical a personage as we are; we are nevertheless determined to offer our sentiments, premising certain reasons why we deem them not unworthy of attention. With a great part of these two branches of the human race, it is, we doubt not, a prevalent impres sion, that the writers of the Christian Spectator are, without exception, an association of lean, hard-favoured gentlemen, who have never felt one emotion softer or gentler than the zeal of controversy, who have never read any thing but the Bible and the treatises of orthodox divines, who have never aspired to the composition of any thing more tasteful than a sermon or a theological disquisition, and whose opinions on matters of taste and polite literature are therefore utterly to be contemned. In opposition to this pre judice, we beg leave to say, that we who guide the pen on this occasion -lean though we may be, and hardfavoured, and withal somewhat addicted to reading the Bible, and somewhat interested in the questions that lay hold upon eternity-have read more tales and romances than the author of Waverly will ever write; have rambled through the groves by moonlight; have indited lugubrious ditties and burning ballads; and furthermore have been the writers of divers unfinished man uscripts quite as edifying, we dare say, as those of the gentleman who comes before the public in a motley coat to give them a peep at the Pilgrims. These things, it is true, were among the freaks of our by-gone days; but we say that those who have been guilty of such freaks are not to be disregarded as if they were too phleg matic in their constitution to bave any fellow-feeling with the heroes, or any admiration for the heroines of fiction. Another reason why we ask the attention of these two classes is, we do not design in the present article to enter into a discussion of the usefulness or lawfulness of novels in general. To our ordinary readers such a discussion would be for the most part unnecessary; and with the extraordinary readers whom we are seeking for once to gratify, it would doubtless break off all negotiation in a moment. Omitting therefore to calculate the value of the time which is devoted to the composition and perusal of novels, or to estimate the correctness of the views which they ordinarily not to say necessarily-give us of human life and its great business, or to analyze the feelings which they are designed to cherish; we shall proceed directly to remark on the works whose titles stand in so formidable array at the head of this article. The most remarkable general characteristic of these works is their common relation to the Waverly Novels-a relation very much the same with that which "Rogers's Columbian Coffee" bears to the real Java. Or to speak more correctly, and with more discrimination, they all sustain to their great model the relation of resemblance; and if, in the most successful of these efforts, the degree of resemblance may be set forth by the comparison just made, the value of the others may be illustrated by comparing them, in their respective degrees of merit, with "pea-coffee," "potato-coffee," ," "rye-coffee," and whatever other counterfeit presentment" of coffee may be still more despicable. This common resemblance of the works before us to the Waverly Novels, makes it proper for us to signify with some degree of explicitness our opinion of those extraordinary productions. We call them extraordinary without hesitation, and without the fear of contradiction; for it cannot be doubted that they deserve and will ever retain a high rank among the standard works of English literature. Their author is the only writer of the age who has been compared with Shakspeare; and surely we offer him high praise, when we say that he is worthy of the comparison. He has not indeed that majesty of thought, or that strength and dignity of language which characterize the great dramatist; nor does he look abroad on the world and its inhabitants with such an aspect and seeming consciousness of superhuman power; nor do his works present so complete an ency clopedia of human feeling and character; nor do they contain so rich a treasure of splendid imaginations and thrilling expressions ;-but still the author of Waverly is worthy to be compared with the author of Hamlet; and as the one is the acknowledged prince of dramatists, so the other has VOL. VII.-No. 2. 11 no rival among the novelists of this or any former age. The Great Unknown-for that seems to be at once the most convenient and the best authorized appellation-writes in a style of purer and more unaffected English than any Scotchman of our day. He enjoys the free use of his faculties; and never seems to walk in gyves like the author of Valerius, or on stilts like the Edinburgh Reviewers. His language is the mere vehicle of his thought, unstudied and unadorned; and almost the only fault which we can lay to his charge in this matter is the fault of an occasional negligence. The excellence of his style is, that the reader never thinks of it: and as in dress, so in style, that is the best which attracts the least attention. Horne Tooke says that the best English is to be found in the conversation of well bred women. We are strongly inclined to his opinion; and though we have not looked at one of those novels for these six months, we venture to assert that the English of the Great Unknown is very much of this description. In respect to delineation of character and knowledge of human nature he is entitled to equal praise. Throughout his volumes we may see a masterly analysis of the human mind in its boundless varieties, and springs of action. His personages a thorough acquaintance with its ines, the robbers and peasants of a are not merely the heroes and heronovel-they are for the most part, human beings; and in all the diversities of character which they present, highlander and lowlander, noble and vassa!, crusading knight and covenanting whig, they exhibit the passions and affections of men. They live and move before us; their names become "Familiar in our mouths as household words;" for we feel that they are kindred to ourselves. And all, because their individual peculiarities are consist ent with the laws of human nature. To this remark, however, there are exceptions, which it were foreign from our purpose to specify. Characters of immaculate goodness, and of unmingled and gratuitous wickedness, are equally remote from probability. We know that such characters are abundant in fiction, but do we meet them in the world of reality? No, Calvinists as we are called, and orthodox as we claim to be, we ever expect to find alike, blemishes on the fairest, and bright spots on the darkest specimens of our nature. There are in man certain social affections which are rarely, if ever, eradicated. There are some principles of comparative loveliness which spring up within him, like ivy and wild flowers round the columns of a fallen temple, spreading a verdure and beauty over the ruins of his moral nature. Many fine illustrations of this are given by the author in question. With few exceptions, the meanest and most abandoned of his characters have some better qualities-some relics of what the world calls virtue and Unitarians call holiness-some traces of those principles which hold society together, and keep the world from falling into chaos. The poetry of the Waverly Novels ought not to be omitted in forming an estimate of their value. We refer not merely to the far-famed mottos from that apocryphal "Old Play," or to those songs and metrical fragments which are scattered through every volume; but to the numberless descriptions-sublime, or picturesque, or beautiful-that pass before the imagination like rainbows ;-and to all those scenes, and passages, and forms of expression, that come home to the heart or the fancy with a warmth and brightness that belong only to poetry, and that realize to us the description of "Thoughts that breathe and words that burn;" broad sense, the author of Waverly is a poet of no ordinary character. The stories which he tells are always more or less improbable, and often unnatural. Indeed a novel, the interest of which depends in any great degree on the plot, is necessarily exposed to the former of these charges; for a history, to be interesting, must contain some events which are strange, out of the common course, improbable. To illustrate our meaning by examples ;in Irving's beautiful sketch of the Pride of the Village,' there is nothing strange or startling,-the reader never asks himself, what next?-nor does the interest of the piece depend on the story at all;-it depends solely on the character and thoughts and feelings of the heroine, and our sympathy in all her emotions. It is the picture of a sensitive female mind, suffering and dying with the pangs of disappointed affection; and it is as such, and not as an eventful story, that it seizes on the attention of the reader. But in Don Quixote and Gil Blas, a great proportion of the interest is derived from the incidents of the story; and these incidents, if not individually, at least in the combination in which they are supposed to exist, are altogether improbable. Something unexpected, and frequently unaccountable, is starting up at every corner; and thus the mind of the reader is kept in a continued state of suspense, joined with a kind of half pleasing, half painful anxiety,-like the mind of a gambler over his cards, or, to compare great things with small, like the mind of a Napoleon playing the game of battle, where the dice are armies and the wager is an empire. And here we must be permitted to remark, that this is the true secret of the mania with which some people devour every thing which is called a novel. The Creator has formed us for activity; and he has so and we say that taking poetry in this constituted our minds as well as our bodies, that idleness is wretchedness, and inactivity is its own punishment. This pain of inactivity is one of the springs which keep the world in motion; but when it operates by itself, without the aid of other motives, it is insufficient to produce exertion; and the mind under its influence will fly to novels, or to cards, or to intoxication, or a kind of feverish excitement, which, though miserable indeed may afford some relief from absolute ennui. An active, powerful mind, operating in favourable circumstances, may make a man the greatest general of his age; and the same mental activity, when peace has thrown him out of employment, may make him as great a gambler. A fashionable young lady, whom circumstances have deprived of her usual employments and amusements, may become, in the same way, a devoted novel-reader. But devoted novel-readers, as well as devoted gamblers, are formed, in most cases, by a different process. There is in works of fiction, as in gaming, a kind of fascination, which, where nothing comes in to break the charm, lures on the victim till his mind has become so stupified and deadened by dissipation, that he can find no enjoyment but in this morbid and feverish excitement. Such a reader, after having exhausted all the novels in existence, if you could once suppose the fountains of fiction to be dried up, would weep as the Macedonian wept when he had conquer ed the world; would weep because his only source of excitement was gone,leaving nothing to save him from the listlessness of perfect inactivity. Fictitious narrative, then, owes its charm to this. It awakens curiosity, and thus furnishes at once stimulus and employment to many a mind whose indolence would shrink from the labour of intellectual pursuits, and whose dulness, poetry itself, "glancing from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth," and bringing back from each excursion its images of light and thoughts of fire,-would never be able to animate. It was for minds like these that novels were invented; and accordingly, in the infancy of this species of writing, incident was every thing,-and to this the author was allowed to sacrifice probability and even nature. But the public mind was soon sated with fictions like these; and it is now required of a novel-writer that he shall conform himself, so far as he knows how, to the laws of nature, and restrain the improbability of his story within certain limits, marked out-not very definitely it is true-by the canons of criticism. The Great Unknown, however, pays but little regard to these limits,-as must have been observed by every reader possessing an ordinary share of discrimination. The consistency, and probability, and effect of his story occupy but a small part of his attention. His great object seems to be, to illustrate the history, and manners, and national character of his country; and to this every thing else, and most of all his plot, is made subordinate. What then has been his success in this particular? And here we acknowledge there is much to admire. He seems to have searched all the records of antiquity. Not a book, not a ballad, not a worm-eaten fragment of a manuscript, that can throw any light on the obscurity of the past, appears to have escaped his notice. He is as familiar with the transactions and manners of former ages, as we are with the events of yesterday. He can tell how lords and ladies, how nobles and vassals, were respectively attired, in the days of King Richard the Lion-hearted, as easily as a milliner can describe the latest fashions from London or Paris. He makes his republican and unromantic readers in America, as well acquainted with the pomp of a tournament, as they are with the parade of a militia review. He delineates the external influence and the internal economy of ancient monastic |