least in these parts, namely, Claud Halcro, the poet, and friend of 'Glorious John.' We do not think him in his place amidst dwarfs, witches, pirates, and Udallers; and his stories of the Wits' Coffeehouse and Dryden's poetry are as tedious to the critical reader as they are to his Zetland patron and hearers. We might confirm this opinion by a quotation, but we should be thought too tedious. He fills up, we will venture to say, a hundred pages of the work with sheer impertinence, with pribble prabble. Whenever any serious matter is to be attended to, Claud Halcro pulls out his fiddle and draws the long bow, and repeats some verses of Glorious John.' Bunce, the friend of Cleveland, is much better; for we can conceive how a strolling-player should turn gentleman-rover in a time of need, and the foppery and finery of the itinerant stage-hero become the quarter-deck exceedingly well. In general, however, our author's humour requires the aid of costume and dialect to set it off to advantage: his wit is Scotch, not English wit. It must have the twang of the uncouth pronunciation and peculiar manners of the country in it. The elder Mertoun is a striking misanthropic sketch; but it is not very well made out in what his misanthropy originates, nor to what it tends. He is merely a part of the machinery: neither is he the first gentleman in these Novels who lands without an introduction on the remote shores of Scotland, and shuts himself up (for reasons best known to himself) in inaccessible and solitary confinement. We had meant to give the outline of the story of the Pirate, but we are ill at a plot, and do not care to blunt the edge of the reader's curiosity by anticipating each particular. As far, however, as relates to the historical foundation of the narrative, the author has done it to our hands, and we give his words as they stand in the Advertisement.

[Nearly the whole of the Advertisement is quoted.]

Of the execution of these volumes we need hardly speak. It is inferior, but it is only inferior to some of his former works. Whatever he touches, we see the hand of a master. He has 'only to describe action, thoughts, scenes, and they everywhere, speak, breathe, and live. It matters not whether it be a calm sea-shore, a mountain tempest, a drunken brawl, the Cathedral's choir and gloom,' the Sybil's watch-tower, or the smuggler's cave; the things are immediately there that we should see, hear, and feel. He is Nature's Secretary. He neither adds to, nor takes away from her book; and that makes him what he is, the most popular writer living. We might give various instances of his unrivalled undecaying power, but shall select only one or two with which we were most struck and delighted in the perusal. The characters of the two sisters, daughters

of Magnus Troil, and the heroines of the tale, are thus beautifully drawn.

[Here follows the description of Minna and Brenda, from Chap. III.]

So much for elegant Vandyke portrait painting. Now for something of the Salvator style. Norna, the terrific and unhappy Norna, is thus finely introduced.

[The first introduction of Norna is quoted from Chap. v.]

We give one more extract in a different style; and we think the comic painting in it is little inferior to Hogarth's.

[A passage, beginning Now the fortunate arrival of Mordaunt,' &c. is quoted from Chap. xI.]

Shall we go on? No, but will leave the reader to revel at ease in the luxuries of feeling and description scattered through the rest of the work.

We have only time to add two remarks more, which we do not remember to have seen made. One relates to the exquisitely goodnatured and liberal tone displayed in the author's quotations from living writers. He takes them every one by turns, and of all factions in poetry and politics, under his wing, and sticks a stanza from Coleridge, from Wordsworth, from Byron, from Crabbe, from Rogers, as a motto to his chapters, not jealous of their popularity, nor disdaining their obscurity. The author can hardly guess how much we like him for this. The second thing we would advert to is a fault, and a remarkable one. It is the slovenliness of the style and badness of the grammar throughout these admirable productions. Badness of the grammar! Slovenly style! What do you mean by that? Take a few instances, and we have done with the subject for ever. We give them seriatim, as we marked them in the margin.

Here Magnus proceeded with great animation, sipping from time to time the half diluted spirit, which at the same time animated his resentment against the intruders,' etc. P. 16.

In those days (for the present times are greatly altered for the better) the presence of a superior in such a situation,' etc. P. 21.

The information, which she acquired by habits of patient attention, were indelibly rivetted in a naturally powerful memory.' P. 48.

And I know not whom else are expected.' P. 56.

'Or perhaps he preferred the situation, of the house and farm which he himself was to occupy (which indeed was a tolerable one) as preferable to that, etc.' P. 89.

The strength of the retiring wave proved even stronger than he had expected,' etc. P. 169.

But let us have done with this, and leave it to the Editor of the Quarterly Review to take up the subject as a mighty important little discovery of his own!

PEVERIL OF THE PEAK'

The London Magazine.] [February, 1823. THE author of Waverley is here himself again; and it is on English ground that he has come upon his feet. Peveril of the Peak is all but equal to the best of the SCOTCH NOVELS. It is no weaving up of old odds and ends; no lazy repetition of himself at second-hand, and the worse for the wear. Peveril is all new, good,1 full of life, spirit, character, bustle, incident, and expectation; nothing is wanting to make it quite equal to the very best of his former productions, but that it has not the same intense interest, nor the same preternatural and overpowering imagery. Fenella, a deaf and dumb dwarf, attached to the Countess of Derby, is, indeed, an exquisitely drawn character, and exerts a sort of quaint, apparently magic influence over the scene; but her connection with it is so capricious, so ambiguous, and at last so improbable, as to produce or to leave none of those thrilling and awe-struck impressions which were so irresistibly interwoven with some former delineations of the same kind. But as a sketch, as a picture, the little fairy attendant of the Queen of Man is one of the most beautiful and interesting the author ever struck out with his enchanting and enchanted pencil. The present Novel comes the nearest to OLD MORTALITY, both in the class of subjects of which it treats, and in the indefatigable spirit and hurried movement of the execution. It differs from that noble masterpiece in this, that Sir Walter (or whoever else, in the devil's name, it is) has not infused the same depth or loftiness of sentiment into his English Roundheads and Cavaliers, as into his Scotch Covenanters and Royalists; that the characters are left more in the outlines and dead colouring; and though the incidents follow one another as rapidly, and have great variety and contrast, there is not the same accumulation of interest, the same thickening of the plot, nor the same thronging together of eager and complicated groups upon the canvas. His English imagi

1 This, we are sorry to say, relates only to the three first volumes. The fourth is in a very mixed style indeed. It looks as if the author was tired, and got somebody to help him.

nation is not so fully peopled with character, manners, and sentiment, as his Scotch understanding is; but, by the mass, they are not 'thinly scattered to make up a show.' There is cut and come again. We say this the more willingly, because we were among those who conceived there was a falling off, a running to seed, in some of the later productions of the author. The FORTUNES OF NIGEL showed a resuscitation in his powers; that is, a disposition to take new ground, and proceed with real pains and unabated vigour; and in his Peveril, we think he has completed his victory over excusable idleness and an inexcusable disregard of reputation. He may now go on upon a fresh lease, and write ten more Novels, just as good or as bad as he pleases!

There were two things that we used to admire of old in this author, and that we have had occasion to admire anew in the present instance, the extreme life of mind or naturalness displayed in the descriptions, and the magnanimity and freedom from bigotry and prejudice shewn in the drawing of the characters. This last quality is the more remarkable, as the reputed author is accused of being a thorough-paced partisan in his own person,-intolerant, mercenary, mean; a professed toad-eater, a sturdy hack, a pitiful retailer or suborner of infamous slanders, a literary Jack Ketch, who would greedily sacrifice any one of another way of thinking as a victim to prejudice and power, and yet would do it by other hands, rather than appear in it himself. Can this be all true of the author of Waverley; and does he deal out such fine and heaped justice to all sects and parties in time past? Perhaps (if so) one of these extremes accounts for the other; and, as he knows all qualities with a learned spirit,' probably he may be aware of this practical defect in himself, and be determined to shew to posterity, that when his own interest was not concerned, he was as free from that nauseous and pettifogging bigotry, as a mere matter of speculation, as any man could be. As a novel-writer, he gives the devil his due, and he gives no more to a saint. He treats human nature scurvily, yet handsomely; that is, much as it deserves; and, if it is the same person who is the author of the Scotch novels, and who has a secret moving hand in certain Scotch Newspapers and Magazines, we may fairly characterize him as

'The wisest, meanest of mankind.'

Among other characters in the work before us, is that of Ned Christian, a cold-blooded hypocrite, pander, and intriguer; yet a man of prodigious talent,-of great versatility,-of unalterable selfpossession and good-humour, and with a power to personate agreeably, and to the life, any character he pleased. Might not such a man have written the Scotch Novels?

It has been suggested, with great modesty, that the Author of Waverley was like Shakspeare. We beg leave with equal modesty to suggest another comparison, which we think much nearer the mark; and that is, to the writings of Mr. Cobbett. The peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind is (we humbly apprehend) that sort of power which completely levels the distinction between imagination and reality. His mind properly has wings, and it is indifferent to him whether he treads the air or walks the earth. He makes us acquainted with things we did not know before, as if we knew them familiarly. Now Sir Walter Scott only recals to us what we already knew he deals wholly in realities, or what are commonly received as such; and so does Mr. Cobbett. Both are down-right matter-offact minds, and have little, if any, of that power which throws into objects more than ordinary opinion or feeling connects with them. Naturalness is the forte of both these writers. They have a strong, vivid, bodily perception (so to speak), a material intuition of what they write about. All their ideas are concrete, and not abstracted. Mention an old, dilapidated castle, and a thriving, substantial brick mansion to Sir Walter Scott, and he immediately has an actual image of some such objects conjured up in his mind, and describes them as he has seen them, with all their local circumstances, and so as to bring back some similar recollection to the reader's mind, as if there had been just two such buildings in the place where he was broughtup. But this revived reality is all; there is no new light thrown upon the subject. It is a sort of poetic memory. Good. So set Mr. Cobbett to work upon the subject of our agricultural distress, and with quite as much poetry, as much of the picturesque, and in as good English as Sir Walter Scott writes Scotch, he will describe you to the life a turnip-field with the green sprouts glittering in the sun, the turnips frozen to a mere clod, the breath of the oxen steaming near that are biting it, and the dumb patience of the silly sheep. We should like to know whether he is not as great a hand at this sort of ocular demonstration as Sir Walter himself? He shall describe a Scotch heath, or an American wilderness against Sir Walter for a thousand pounds. Then for character; who does it with more master-strokes, with richer gusto, or a greater number of palpable hits than the Editor of the Political Register? Again, as to pathos, let Mr. Cobbett tell a story of a pretty servant girl or soldier's wife, left by her sweetheart, or shot dead in his arms, and see if he will not come near the Heart of Mid Lothian? You may say it is not this or that, it is coarse, low, the man has no feeling, but it is nature, and that's quite enough. The truth is, these two original geniuses have found out a secret; they write as they feel. It is just like school