The tone of Southey's poems is too uniformly ecstatic and agonizing. His personages, like his scenes, have something unreal, phantom-like, dreamy about them. His robe of inspiration sits gracefully and majestically upon him, but it is too voluminous in its folds, and too heavy in its texture, for the motion of real existence.

Southey's prose works are very numerous and valuable on account of their learning. The Life of Nelson (311), written to furnish young seamen with a simple narrative of the exploits of England's greatest naval hero, has perhaps never been equalled for the perfection of its style. In his principal works-The Book of the Church, The Lives of the British Admirals, The Life of Wesley, a History of Brazil, and a History of the Peninsular War-we find the same clear, vigorous English; we find also the strong prejudice and violent political and literary partiality, which detract from his many excellent qualities as a writer and as a man.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE MODERN NOVELISTS.

THE HE department of English literature which has been cultivated during the latter half of the last and the first half of the present century with the greatest assiduity and success, is prose fiction. To give an idea of the fruitfulness of this branch of our subject, it will be advisable to classify the authors and their productions under the two general divisions of fiction as they were set forth in a preceding chapter, viz.: I. Romances properly so called, i. e., the narration of picturesque and romantic adventures; II. Novels, or pictures of real life and society.

I. ROMANCES.-The impulse to this branch of composition was first given by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) (326), the fastidious dilettante and brilliant chronicler of the court scandal of his day; a man of singularly acute penetration, of sparkling epigrammatic style, but devoid of enthusiasm and elevation. He retired early from political life, and shut himself up in his little fantastic Gothic castle of Strawberry Hill, to collect armor, 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 preparation. It was the first successful attempt to take the Feudal Age as the period, and the passion of mysterious, superstitious terror as the motive to the action of an interesting fiction. The manners are totally absurd and unnatural, the character of the heroine being one of those inconsistent portraits in which the sentimental languor of the eighteenth century is superadded to the gentlewoman of the Middle Ages-in short, one of those contradictions to be found in all the romantic fictions before Scott.

The success of Walpole's original and cleverly-written tale encouraged other and more accomplished artists to follow in the same track. The most popular of this class was Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose numerous romances appeal with power to the emotion of fear. Her two greatest works are The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho. The scenery of Italy and the south of France pleases her fancy; the ruined castles of the Pyrenees and Apennines form the theatre, and the dark passions of profligate Italian counts are the moving power, of her wonderful fictions. Mystery is the whole spell; the personages have no more individuality than the pieces of a chess-board; but they are made the exponents of such terrible and intense fear, suffering, and suspense, that we sympathize with their fate as if they were real. At the beginning of the century her romances were held in the highest esteem by all readers. Men of letters-Talfourd, Byron, Scottapplauded her: but her fame is declining, and she is now known only by the students of literature. The effect of this kind of writing was so powerful that it was attempted by a crowd of authors. Most of them are forgotten; but there are two other names worthy of special mention.

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), a good-natured, effeminate man of fashion, the friend of Byron, and one of the early literary advisers of Scott, was the first to introduce into England a taste for the infant German literature of that day, with its spectral ballads and enchantments. He was a man of lively and childish imagination; and besides his metrical translations of the ballads of Bürger, he published in his twentieth year a prose romance called The Monk, one of the boldest of hobgoblin stories. Mrs. Shelley (1798–1851), the wife of the poet, and the daughter of William Godwin, wrote the powerful tale of Frankenstein. Its hero, a young student of physiology, succeeds in constructing, out of the horrid remnants of the churchyard and dissecting-room, a monster, to which he afterwards gives a spectral and convulsive life. Some of the chief appearances of the monster, particularly the moment when he begins to move for the first time, and towards the end of the book, among the eternal snows of the arctic circle, are managed with a striking and breathless effect, that makes us for a moment forget the extravagance of the tale.

II. Our second subdivision-the novels of real life and society-is so extensive that we can give but a rapid glance at its principal productions. To do this consistently with clearness, we must begin rather far back, with the novels of Miss Burney. Frances Burney (1752-1840) was the daughter of Dr. Burney, author of the History of Music. While yet residing at her father's house, she, in moments of leisure, composed the novel of Evelina, published in 1778. It is said that she did not even communicate to her father the secret of her having written it, until the astonishing success of the fiction rendered her avowal triumphant and almost necessary. Evelina was followed in 1782 by Cecilia, a novel of the same character. In 1786 Miss Burney received an appointment in the household of Queen Charlotte, where she remained till her marriage with Count d'Arblay, a French refugee officer. She published after her marriage a novel entitled Camilla, and two years after her death her Diary and Letters appeared.

An eminent place in this class of writers belongs to William Godwin (1756–1836), a man of truly powerful and original genius, who devoted his whole life to the propagation of social and political theories- visionary, indeed, and totally impracticable, but marked with the impress of benevolence and philanthropy. His long life was incessantly occupied with literary activity: he produced an immense number of works, some immortal for the genius and originality they display, and all for an intensity and gravity of thought, for reading and erudition. The first work which brought him into notice was the Inquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), a Utopian theory by which virtue and benevolence were to be the primum mobile of all human actions, and a philosophical republic was to take the place of all our imperfect forms of government. The first and finest of his fictions is Caleb Williams (1794). Its chief didactic aim is to show the misery and injustice arising from the present imperfect constitution of society, and the oppression of defective laws, not merely those of the statute-book, but also those of social feeling and public opinion. Caleb Williams is an intelligent peasant-lad, taken into the service of Falkland. Falkland, the true hero, is an incarnation of honor, intellect, benevolence, and passionate love of fame, who, in a moment of ungovernable passion, has committed a murder, for which he allows an innocent man to be executed. This circumstance, partly by acci

dent, partly by his master's voluntary confession, Williams learns, and is in consequence pursued through the greater part of the tale by the unrelenting persecution of Falkland, who is now led, by his frantic and unnatural devotion to fame, to annihilate, in Williams, the evidence of his guilt. The adventures of the unfortunate fugitive, his dreadful vicissitudes of poverty and distress, the steady pursuit, the escapes and disguises of the victim, like the agonized turnings and doublings of the hunted hare-all this is so depicted that the reader follows the story with breathless interest. At last Caleb is accused by Falkland of robbery, and naturally discloses before the tribunal the dreadful secret which has caused his long persecution, and Falkland dies of shame and a broken heart. The interest of this wonderful tale is indescribable; the various scenes are set before us with something of the minute reality, the dry, grave simplicity of Defoe. "There is no work of fiction which more rivets the attention no tragedy which exhibits a struggle more sublime, or suffering more intense, than this; yet to produce the effect, no complicated machinery is employed, but the springs of action are few and simple." *

At the head of the very large class of women who, as novelists, have adorned the more recent literature of England, we must place Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). Nearly all of her long and useful life was passed in Ireland. Many of her earlier works were produced in partnership with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a man of eccentric character, and of great intellectual activity. The most valuable series of Miss Edgeworth's educational stories were the charming tales entitled Frank, Harry and Lucy, Rosamond, and others, combined under the general heading of Early Lessons. These are written in the simplest style, and are intelligible and intensely interesting even to very young readers; while the knowledge of character they display, the naturalness of their incidents, and the practical principles they inculcate, make them delightful even to the adult reader. The first, the most original, and the best of her stories is Castle Rackrent. Abounding in humor and pathos, it sets forth with dramatic effect the follies and vices of the Irish landlords, who have caused so much of the misery of the Irish people. In the novels of Patronage, and The Absentee, other social errors, either peculiar to that country or common *T. N. Talfourd.