metaphors and images: it is impossible to open his plays without seeing plentiful instances of it: it is, indeed, the characteristic of his manner: but in him the secondary, the illustrative, is always subordinate; while in Shelley the ornament perpetually eclipses the thing to be adorned. In short, Shakspeare "writes all like a man," while Shelley writes like a woman. This singular tendency sometimes renders passages otherwise beautiful almost unintelligible, as, for instance, in those wonderful lines On a Cloud,' where the illustrations, drawn from animated nature, are so crowded in the delineation of inanimate things, that the effect is rather fantastical and dazzling than beautiful or distinct. Conscious, too, perhaps, of this feminineness of mind, so ill in accordance with the haughty and serene tone of philosophy which he struggled to maintain, he was apt to exaggerate the horrible and repulsive, and his struggles to attain energy and a fierce declamatory tone are often rather extravagant than powerful. But with all these deductions made, the genius of Shelley will not fail to be held by posterity as a wonderful manifestation of power, of grace, and sweetness; and the ode we have just quoted, and the lovely Lines written in the Euganean Hills,' and that to a 'Skylark,' which is the very warbling of the triumphant bird, and the tender beauty of the 'Sensitive Plant,' and the magical translations of the Walpurgisnacht' of Goethe, and a thousand passages in the longer poems, will form for the memory of Shelley a wreath of fadeless flowers worthy of him. who was the friend of Byron, and the pure apostle of a noble but mistaken philanthropy. 6 X CHAPTER XIX. THE MODERN NOVELISTS. Prose Fiction--The Romance: Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, and Mrs. Shelley--James, Ainsworth, and Bulwer-The Novel: Miss Burney-Godwin-Miss Edgeworth-Local Novels: Galt, Wilson, Banim, &c.-Fashionable Novels: Ward, Lister, &c.-Miss AustenHook-Mrs. Trollope--Miss Mitford-Warren-Dickens-Novels of Foreign Life: Beckford, Hope, and Morier-Naval and Military Novels: Marryat and R. Scott. Prose fiction. THE department of English literature which has been cultivated during the latter half of the last and the commencement of the present century with the greatest assiduity and success is undoubtedly that of prose fiction-the romance and the novel. This branch of our subject is so extensive, and it embraces such a multitude of works and names, that the only feasible method of treating it so as to give an idea of its immense riches and fertility will be to classify the authors and their productions into a few great general species: and though there are some names (as that of Bulwer, for example) which may appear to belong to several of these subdivisions, our plan will be found, we trust, to secure clearness and aid the memory. The divisions which we propose are as follows: I. Romances properly so called; i. e. works of narrative fiction, embodying periods of ancient or middle-age history, the adventures of which are generally of a picturesque and romantic character, and the personages (whether taken from history, or invented so as to accord with the time and character of the action) of a lofty and imposing kind. II. The vast class of pictures of society, whether invented or not. These are generally novels, i. e. romans de vie intime, though some, as those of Godwin, may be highly imaginative, and even tragic. This class contains a great treasury of what may be called pictures of local manners, as of Scottish and Irish life. III. Oriental novels-a branch almost peculiar to English fiction; and originating partly in the acquaintance with the East derived by Great Britain from her gigantic Oriental empire, and partly from the Englishman's restless, inappeasable passion for travelling. IV. Naval and military novels; giving pictures of striking adventure, and containing records of England's innumerable triumphs, by sea and land, together with sketches of the manners, habits, and feelings of our soldiers and sailors. 6 Walpole. The history of modern prose fiction in England will be found to accord pretty closely with the classification we have just adopted. We have spoken in another place of the three patriarchs of the English novelRichardson, Fielding, and Smollett; and the immense class of works we are about to consider may be looked upon as totally distinct from the immortal productions of these great men, though the first impulse given to prose fiction will be found to have been in no sense communicated by Clarissa,'' Tom Jones,' or 'Roderick Random.' This impulse was given by Horace Walpole, the fastidious dilettante and brilliant chronicler of the court scandal of his day, a man of singularly acute penetration, of sparkling epigrammatic style, but of a mind devoid of enthusiasm and elevation. Rather a French courtier in taste and habits than an English nobleman, he retired early from political life, veiling a certain consciousness of political incapacity under an effeminate and affected contempt for a parliamentary career, and shut himself up in his little fantastic Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill, to collect armour, medals, manuscripts, and painted glass, and to chronicle with malicious assiduity, in his vast and brilliant correspondence, the absurdities, follies, and weaknesses of his day. 'The Castle of Otranto' is a short tale, written with great rapidity and without any preparation, in which the first successful attempt was made to take the Feudal Age as the period, and the passion of mysterious, superstitious terror as the prime mover, of an interesting fiction. The supernatural machinery consists of a gigantic armed figure dimly seen at midnight in the gloomy halls and huge staircases of this feudal abode of a colossal helmet which finds its way into the court yard, filling everybody with dread and consternation-of a picture which descends from its frame to upbraid a wicked oppressor-of a vast apparition at the end—and a liberal allowance of secret panels, subterranean passages, breathless pursuit and escape. The manners are totally absurd and unnatural, the heroine being one of those inconsistent portraits in which the sentimental languor of the eighteenth century is superadded to the female character of the Middle Ages-in short, one of those incongruous contradictions which we meet in all the romantic fictions before Scott. 6 The immense success of Walpole's original and cleverlyMrs. Rad- written tale encouraged other and more accomcliffe. plished artists to follow in the same track. After mentioning Clara Reeve, whose 'Old English Baron' contains the same defects without the beauties of Walpole's haunted castle, we come to the great name of this class, Anne Radcliffe, whose numerous romances exhibit a very high order of genius, and a surprising power (perhaps never equalled) over the emotions of fear and undefined mysterious suspense. Her two greatest works are, 'The Romance of the Forest,' and The Mysteries of Udolpho.' The scenery of her predilection is that of Italy and the south of France; and though she does not place the reader among the fierce and picturesque life of the Middle Ages, she has, perhaps, rather gained than lost by choosing the ruined castles of the Pyrenees and Apennines for the theatre, and the dark passions of profligate Italian counts for the principal moving power, of her wonderful fictions. The substance of them all is pretty nearly the same; and the author's total incapacity to paint individual character only makes us the more admire the power by which she interests us through the never-failing medium of suspense. Mystery is the whole spell. Nothing can be poorer and more conventional than the personages: they are not human beings, nor even the types of classes; they have no more individuality than the pieces of a chessboard; they are merely counters; but the skill with which the author juggles with them gives them a kind of awful necromantic interest. The characters are mere abstract algebraical expressions, but they are made the exponents of such terrible and intense fear, suffering, and suspense, that we sympathise with their fate as if they were real. Her repertory is very limited: a persecuted sentimental young lady, a wicked and mysterious count, a haggard monk, a tattling but faithful waiting-maid,-such is the poor human element out of which these wonderful structures are created. Balzac, in one of his tales, speaks with great admiration of an artist who, by a few touches of his pencil, could give to a most commonplace scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of crime and blood. Through a half-opened door you see a bed with the clothes confusedly heaped, as in some deathstruggle, over an undefined object which fancy whispers must be a bleeding corpse; on the floor you see a slipper, an upset candlestick, and a knife perhaps; and these hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more powerfully than the most tremendous detail, because the imagination of man is more powerful than art itself: "Over all there hung a cloud of fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, The great defect of Anne Radcliffe's fictions is not their tediousness of description, nor even the somewhat mawkish sentimentality with which they may be reproached, nor the feebly-elegant verses which the heroines are represented as writing on all occasions (indeed all these things indirectly conduce to the effect by contrast and preparation); but the unfortunate principle she had imposed upon herself, of clearing up, at the end of the story, all the circumstances that appeared supernatural-of carrying us, as it were, behind the scenes at the end of the play, and showing us the dirty ropes and trap-doors, the daubed canvas, the Bengal fire, by which these wonderful impressions had been produced. If we had supped after the play with the "blood-bolter'd Banquo," or the "majesty of buried Denmark," we should not probably be able to feel a due amount of terror the next time we saw them on the stage; but in Mrs. Radcliffe, where the feeling of terror is the principal thing aimed at, this |