ness of disappointmen; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space, were now become a hell to me, and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete! ་ Morning, dismal and wet, at length dawned, and discovered to my sleepless and aching yes the church of Ingolstadt, its white steeple and clock, which indicated the sixth hour. The porter opened the gates of the court which had that night been my asylum, and I issued into the streets, pacing them with quick steps, as if I sought to avoid the wretch whom I feared every turning of the street would present to my view. I did not dare to return to the apartment which I inhabited, but felt inpelled to hurry on, although wetted by the rain, which poured from a black and comfortless sky. I continued walking in this manner for some time, endeavoring, by bodily exercise, to ease the load that weighed upon my mind. I traversed the streets without any clear conception of where I was or what I was doing. My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me Like one who on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round, walks on, Doth close behind him tread. * The monster ultimately becomes a terror to his creator, and haunts him like a spell. For two years he disappears, but at the end of that time he is presented as the murderer of Frankenstein's infant brother, and as waging war with all mankind, in consequence of the disgust and violence with which his appearance is regarded. The demon meets and confronts his maker, demanding that he should create him a helpmate, as a solace in his forced expatriation from society. Frankenstein retires and begins the hideous task, and while engaged in it during the secrecy of midnight, in one of the lonely islands of the Orcades, the Monster appears before him. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he allotted to me. Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my progress, and claim the fulfilment of my promise. As I looked on him his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness of my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew. A series of horrid and malignant events now mark the career of the demon. He murders the friend of Frankenstein, strangles his bride on her wedding-night, and causes the death of his father from grief. He eludes detection; but Frankenstein, in agony and despair, resolves to seek him out, and sacrifice him to his justice and revenge. The pursuit is protracted for a considerable time, and in various countries, and at length conducts us to the ice-bound shores and islands of the northern ocean. Frankenstein recognizes the demon, but ere he can reach him, the ice gives way, and he is afterwards with difficulty rescued from the floating wreck by the crew of a vessel that had been embayed in that polar region. Thus saved from * Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. ng, Frankenstein relates to the captain of the ship his 'wild ondrous tale;' but the suffering and exhaustion had proved too for his frame, and he expires before the vessel had sailed for The Monster visits the ship, and after mourning over the ody of his victim, quits the vessel, resolved to seek the most n extremity of the globe, and there to put a period to his ed and unhallowed existence. The power of genius in clothing ts the most improbable with strong interest and human sym, is evince in this remarkable story. The creation of the deadmirably told. The successive steps by which the solitary I arrives at his great secret after two years of labour, and the impse which he obtains of the hideous monster, form a narraat cannot be perused without sensations of awe and terror. the demon is thus partially known and revealed, or seen only distance, gliding among cliffs and glaciers, appearing by moono demand justice from his maker, or seated in his car among mendous solitudes of the northern ocean, the effect is striking agnificent. The interest ceases when we are told of the selfion of the Monster, which is disgustingly minute in detail, and in conception; and when we consider the improbability of his able to commit so many crimes in different countries, conspicuhe is in form, with impunity, and without detection. His ity of disposition, and particularly his resentment towards enstein, do not appear unnatural when we recollect how he has epelled from society, and refused a companion by him who lone create such another. In his wildest outbursts we partly thise with him, and his situation seems to justify his crimes icting the internal workings of the mind and the various of the passions, Mrs. Shelley evinces skill and acuteness. er father, she excels in mental analysis and in conceptions of and and the powerful, but fails in the management of her where probable incidents and familiar life are required or atr the death of her husband, Mrs. Shelley-who was left with two en--devoted herself to literary pursuits, and produced several -Valperga,' 'The Last Man, Lodore,' 'The Fortunes of Perarbeck,' and other works of fiction. She contributed biographies ign artists and men of letters to the Cabinet Cyclopædia,' and wrote prefaces to Shelley's Poetical Works,' and also Shelley's Essays,' 'Letters from Abroad,' Translations ragments (1810) In the writings of Mrs. Shelley there is of that plaintive tenderness and melancholy characteristic of her's late romances, and her style is uniformly pure and graceShe died in 1851, aged fifty-four. ed. 6 ་ ་ REV. C. R. MATURIN. The REV. C. R. MATURIN (1782-1824), curate of St. Peter's, Dublin, came forward in 1807 as an imitator of the terrific and gloomy style of novel-writing, of which 'Monk' Lewis was the modern master. Its higher mysteries were known only to Mrs. Radcliffe. The date of that style, as Maturin afterwards confessed, was out when he was a boy, and he had not powers to revive it. His youthful production was entitled 'Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio.' The first part of this title was the invention of the publisher, and it proved a good bookselling appellation, for the novel was in high favour in the circulating libraries. It is undoubtedly a work of genius-full of imagination and energetic language, though both are carried to extravagance and bombast. Between 1807 and 1820 our author published a number of works of romantic fiction- The Milesian Chief; The Wild Irish Boy;' Women, or Pour et Contre;' and 'Melmoth the Wanderer'-all works in three or four volumes each. 'Women' was well received by the public; but none of its predecessors, as the author himself states, ever reached a second edition. In Women' he aimed at depicting real life and manners, and we have some pictures of Calvinistic Methodists, an Irish Meg Merrilies, and an Irish hero, De Courcy, whose character is made up of contradictions and improbabilities. Two female characters, Eva Wentworth and Zaira, a brilliant Italian-who afterwards turns out to be the mother of Eva-are drawn with delicacy and fine effect. The former is educated in strict seclusion, and is purity itself. De Courcy is in love with both, and both are blighted by his inconstancy. Eva dies calmly and tranquilly, elevated by religious hope. Zaira meditates suicide, but desists from the attempt, and lives on, as if speil-bound to the death-place of her daughter and lover. De Courcy perishes of remorse. These scenes of deep passion and pathos are coloured with the lights of poetry and genius. Indeed, the gradual decay of Eva is the happiest of all Mr. Maturin's delineations, and has rarely been surpassed. The simple truthfulness of the description may be seen in passages like the following: An Autumn Evening. The weather was unusually fine, though it was September, and the evenings mild and beautiful. Eva passed them almost entirely in the garden. She had always loved the fading light and delicious tints of an evening sky, and now they were endeared by that which endears even indifferent things-an internal consciousness that we have not long to behold them. Mrs. Wentworth remonstrated against this indulgence, and mentioned it to the physician: but he answered neglectingly;' said anything that amused her mind could do her no harm, &c. Then Mrs. Wentworth began to feel there was no hope; and Eva was suffered to muse life away unmolested. To the garden every evening she went, and brought her library with her: it consisted of but three books-the Bible, Young's 'Night Thoughts,' and Blair's Grave.' One evening the unusual beauty of the sky may made her involuntarily drop her book. She gazed upward, and felt as if a book was open in heaven, where all the lovely and varying phenomena presented in living characters to her view the the Divinity. There was a solemn congeniality between her feelings of her te and the view of the declining day-the parting light and the approaching S. The glow of the western heaven was still resplendent and glorious; a lite, the blending hues of orange and azure were softening into a mellow and te light; and in the upper region of the air, a delicious blue darkness ine eye to repose in luxurious dimness; one star alone shewed its trembling nother and another, like infant births of light; and in the dark east the halfike a bark of pearl, came on through the deep still ocean of heaven. Eva n; some tears came to her eyes; they were a luxury. Suddenly she felt as ere quite well; a gicw like that of health pervaded her whole frame-one of describable sensations that seem to assure us of safety, while, in fact, they are cing dissolution. She imagined herself suddenly restored to health and to hapShe saw De Courcy once more, as in their early hours of love, when his to her as if it had been the face of an angel; thought after thought came her heart like gleams of paradise. She trembled at the felicity that filled ole soul; it was one of those fatal illusions that disease, when it is conwith strong emotions of the mind, often flatters its victim with-that mirage, e heart is a desert, which rises before the wanderer, to dazzle, to delude, and by. Imoth' is the wildest of Mr. Maturin's romances. The hero as with demon light,' and owing to a compact with Satan, lives iry and a half, performing all manner of adventures, the most ble of which is frightening an Irish miser to death. Some of ails in Melmoth' are absolutely sickening and loathsome. seem the last convulsive efforts and distortions of the 'Monk' school of romance. In 1824-the year of his premature death Maturin published The Albigenses,' a romance in four volumes. work was intended by the author as one of a series of romances ative of European feelings and manners in ancient, in middle, modern times. Laying the scene of his story in France, in irteenth century, the author connected it with the wars between tholics and the Albigenses, the latter being the earliest of the ers of the faith. Such a time was well adapted for the purof romance; and Mr. Maturin in this work presented some good es of the Crusaders, and of the Albigenses in their lonely wor mong rocks and mountains. He had not, however, the power neating varieties of character, and his attempts at humour are ed failures. In constructing a plot, he was also deficient; and The Albigenses,' wanting the genuine features of an historimance, and destitute of the supernatural machinery which had ted a certain degree of wild interest to the author's former , was universally pronounced to be tedious and uninteresting. res, as we have said, are carefully finished and well drawn, and ojoin a brief specimen : A Lady's Chamber in the Thirteenth Century. m weary,' said the lady, 'disarray me for rest. But thou, Claudine, be near sleep; I love thee well, wench, though I have not shewn it hitherto. Wear -kanet for my sake; but wear it not, I charge thee, in the presence of Sir PalNow read me my riddle once more, my maidens.' As her head sunk on the pillow-How may ladies sink most sweetly into their first slumber? 'I ever sleep best,' said Blanche, when some withered crone is seated by the hearth fire to tell me tales of wizardry or goblins, till they are mingled with my dreams, and I start up, tell my beads, and pray her to go on, till I see that I am talking only to the dying embers, or the fantastic forms suuped by their flashes on the dark tapestry or darker ceiling.' And I love,' said Germonda, to be lulled to rest by tales of knights met in forests by fairy damsels, and conducted to enchanted halls, where they are assailed by foul fiends, and do battle with strong giants; and are, in fine, rewarded with the hand of the fair dame, for whom they have perilled all that knight or Christian may hold precious for the safety of body and of soul.' Peace and good rest to you all, my dame and maidens,' said the lady, in whispering tones from her silken couch. None of you have read my riddle. She sleeps sweetest and deepest who sleeps to dream of her first love-her first-her last-her only. A fair goodnight to all. Stay thou with me, Claudine, and touch thy lute, wench, to the strain of some old ditty-old and melancholy-such as may so softly usher sleep that I feel not his downy fingers closing mine eyelids, or the stilly rush of his pinions as they sweep my brow.' Claudine prepared to obey as the lady sunk to rest amid softened lights, subdued odours and dying melodies. A silver lamp, richly fretted, suspended from the raftered roof, gleamed faintly on the splendid bed. The curtains were of silk, and the coverlet of velvet, faced with miniver; gilded coronals and tufts of plumage shed alternate gleam and shadow over every angle of the canopy; and tapestry of silk and silver covered every compartment of the walls, save where the uncouthly constructed doors and windows broke them into angles, irreconcilable alike to every rule of symmetry or purpose of accommodation. Near the ample hearth, stored with blazing wood. were placed a sculptured desk, furnished with a missal and breviary gorgeously illuminated, and a black marble tripod supporting a vase of holy-water; certain amulets, too, lay on the hearth, placed there by the care of Dame Marguerite, some in the shape of relics, and others in less consecrated forms on which the lady was often observed by her attendants to look somewhat disregardfully. The great door of the chamber was closed by the departing damsels carefully; and the rich sheet of tapestry dropped over it, whose hushful sweeping on the floor seemed like the wish for a deep repose breathed from a thing inanimate. The castle was still, the silver lamp twinkled silently and dimly; the perfumes burning in small silver vases round the chamber, began to abate their gleams and odours; the scented waters scattered on the rushes with which the floor was strewn, flagged and failed in their delicious tribute to the sense; the bright moon pouring its glories through the uncurtained but richly tinted casement, shed its borrowed hues of crimson, amber and purple on curtain and canopy as in defiance of the artificial light that gleamed so feebly within the chamber. Claudine tuned her lute, and murmured the rude song of a troubadour, such as follows: Song. Sleep, noble lady! They sleep well who sleep in warded castles. If the Count de Monfort, the champion of the church, and the strongest lance in the chivalry of France, were your foe as he is your friend, one hundred of the arrows of his boldest archers at their best flight would fail to reach a loophole of your towers. Sleep, noble lady! They sleep well who are guarded by the valiant. Five hundred belted knights feast in your halls; they would not see your towers won, though to defend them they took the place of your vassals, who are tenfold that number; and, lady, I wish they were more, for your sake. Valiant knights. faithful vassals, watch well your lady's slumbers; see that they be never broken but by the matin bell, or the sighs of lovers whispered between its tolls. Sleep, noble lady! Your castle is strong, and the brave and the loyal are your guard. SIR WALTER SCOTT. We have already touched on the more remarkable and distinguishing features of the Waverley novels, and the influence which they exercised, not only on this country, but over the whole continent of |