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and de-humanized nature of a spirit. When our critic is furnished with some better argument on this subject than pure assertion, it will be then time enough to think of refuting him. There is a great deal in this paragraph, which I do not very well comprehend, and therefore will not attempt to answer.

Where the Observationer collected his information upon the nature of spirits, their faculties and attributes, I am neither able to conjecture nor solicitous to inquire. I should be sorry to drink from the same well. Whether indeed he has any notion at all, popular or philosophical, of the beings whose properties are the subject of his essay, is a question which his remarks leave more than problematical. In one place for instance, he saith, choosing a mode of expression superior (as it were) to all argument-"I am yet to learn why a ghost's voice should be so exceedingly thin, airy, and tremulous." Again he is altogether heap-struck at the incomprehensible assertion in the Ghost-player's Guide, that a spirit should be "dim, shadowy, and indefinite;" nor can he possibly conceive what difference it would make in point of sublimity, though the ghost were as tangible and concrete as King Log in the quagmire, as familiar as my friend-by-the-buttonhole, or a pet monkey. Gog in Guildhall, perhaps, is the Belvedere from which all his visions of spiritual grandeur and magnificence are modelled. A hollow pumpkin on a pole, wide-mouth'd and saucer-eyed, with a blazing ember in its teeth, and a white sheet for a shroud, seem to constitute his beau-ideal of a phantom. The terror of the nurseryFee-fa-fum, with Master Bold-child's bug-a-boo Rawhead-and-Bloodybones, appear to stand the ne plus ultras beyond which his imagination cannot sail a knot, into the sublimer world of spirits. The Observationer is all agog for a noisy ghost. He would have the spirit "ring his iron heel to the ground" (forgetting, by the bye, that our ghosts are buckramghosts, and seldom have iron heels to ring to or on the ground, whichever our critic thinks most grammatical). He is clamorous against a spirit being represented as a "noiseless vapour." A spirit that is, in fact,

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spirit, he seems to regard as a contradiction in nature. To establish his theory, what does our irrefragable? This, videlicet: He taxes his memory with several painful quotations which indubitably prove that the ghost is " majestical," that he "marches,” and “stalks.' Now I believe it is not every reader who, like our friend Horrida, enjoys such a very happy obliquity of mental vision as enables him to perceive any necessary connexion between marching or stalking, or being majestical, and noise. That must be an inestimable species of logic which is mighty to prove, that because a ghost is six feet high, or steps a yard wide, he per consequence therefore, treads like an elephant in jackboots, or an hippopotamus in pattens. But such a mode of argument is exactly what I should expect from him who could maintain the principle. What a pity that ghosts do not walk on allfour! What a pity that ghosts wear neither hoofs nor horse-shoes! What a pity that we cannot have asses to perform the part of men, as we sometimes see men perform the part of asses!

The source of all Signior Horrida's misconceptions upon the subject of spiritual voice, form, motion, &c. is that from which many a novelist and romance-writer has drunk bewilderment before. In a word, he confounds a ghost with a dead man. Were King Hamlet's such a goblin as Giles Scroggins's probably wasa corpse put in motion for a time by some infernal method of galvanism, then I grant, with his worship, that it "should not vary a tittle from the gentleman whom it is destined to represent." But Shakspeare was no such poetical body-snatcher as friend Horrida would make him; his ghosts are spirits, aërial beings, whose attributes, therefore, must be such as are not inconsistent with an insubstantial material like æther,―viz. feeble voice, faint form, and noiseless motion. There is not I believe a single description of a ghost to be met with in any great poet, Job, Homer, Virgil, Össian, &c. in which dimness, shadowiness, and indistinctness of figure, feebleness, airiness, and thinness of voice, do not form the prominent characteristics. But I can scarcely be surprised at Signior Hor

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Yet our critic would have the ghost "ring his iron heel to the ground," and, in face of the fact, denies that Shakspeare ever intended him to "glide," or move as a noiseless vapour! Truly, friend Horrida, you must have been walking in a wilderness when you penned this notable Essay; no critical buzzard ever fell into such a labyrinth of errors as you have, in these your Observations.

It is curious enough, and I acknow ledge less the result of my own precaution than of this gentleman's temerity, that he does not seriously assault one fortress in the Ghostplayer's Guide, where a single puff of a goose-quill does not blow him on his back, or into the mouth of his own

cannon. He is for instance quite scandalized at my proposal that the ghost in Hamlet should put on a panoply of "burnished tin;" when he should recollect, that the ghost's present panoply is buckram, and that my proposal only went to substitute for a bad article, a better, as the best ("complete steel") has no peg in the property-room. The gentleman may, indeed, "tear the cave where Echo lies," if he pleases, making her shout for-steel armour! Thus a child cries for the moon, and the moon looks it full in the face, but comes not

an inch the nearer.

The above are the principal" arguments" (such as they be) in the "Observations" deserving of reply, which indeed I should not have troubled myself to give, but that I feared they might be productive of mischievous effects upon the Art of Ghost-playing, by darkening instead of illuminating the public mind with regard to that important matter. It is an old saying that "true nomeaning puzzles more than wit;" the proverb is particularly exemplified in Signior Horrida Bella's Essay. His "rivulet of text" carrying with it such a compost of heterogeneous materials, has enabled him so to muddy the clear state of the question, that a superficial reader cannot easily see to the bottom of it.

REDGAUNTLET.*

THE two most celebrated writers of this age, Lord Byron and the Author of Waverley, resemble each other not a little in their works. Their respective series of productions, from Childe Harold to Don Juan, and from Waverley to Redgauntlet, though differing essentially in structure, object, and subject, agree nevertheless in several particulars. Each series, for example, evinces a remarkable qualification of mind in its author, and each betrays a remarkable defect. It is likewise a singular coincidence, that the same qualification and the same defect

should exist in both,-viz. extraordinary facility of invention as far as respects composition, difficulty of invention as far as respects character. Both authors are about equally remarkable for the said power and (if we may use the expression) impotence of mind, in these different provinces of invention.

And first, as to composition. The prodigal effusion of poetry which, in Childe Harold, the Corsair, the Giaour, &c. &c. almost overwhelmed the reading world, is only to be paralleled by the quantity of prose so dissolutely expended in the compo

Redgauntlet, a Tale of the Eighteenth Century, by the Author of Waverley. 3 vols. Constable, Edinburgh, 1824. JULY, 1824.

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sition of Waverley, Guy Mannering, &c. &c. a series to which indeed we can see no probable termination. Both the poems and the novels indicate a fertility of mind in this respect, amounting to what might be designated even a rank luxuriance. Before we had eaten down one crop of this intellectual pasture, another began to tickle our noses, and a third growth shot up whilst our heads were deep in the second. There is here an obvious resemblance between the two series of works now compared. It would be hard to say whether the Poet or the Novelist were the greater spendthrift of his words. In both, eloquence is of so plentiful and profluent a nature, that it takes the form, and might assume the name, of-splendid loquacity. The labour with these authors seems to have been, merely that of transcribing from the folds of the brain to the leaves of their paper. No time or exertion appears to have been requisite for conjuring up the little phantasmagoria of images which haunt the recesses of the memory; they came without whoop or hollow, which we, poor scribes! have to cry out several times, to the dull population of our brain, before we can obtain any answer. Facility in composition-and when we say this, we do not mean fluency without a considerable degree of solidity,-is the qualification in which these two great writers chiefly resemble each other, and that perhaps in which they most surpass all their cotemporaries; who, by the way, leaving solidity entirely out of the question, are in no wise deficient as to this particular of fleetness in composition. We allow there is much difference between the "weighty bullion" of Childe Harold or Waverley, and the "French wire" into which the small portion of sterling ore forming the real worth of Sardanapalus or Redgauntlet is drawn; but still, the same ease of language, the same wealth of imagery, is every where displayed, even in their most precipitate works, by each writer, and with about equal claims on our

admiration.

It was this qualification which, possessed in the highest degree, tempted both (and still tempts one) to write down their reputation, by writing upon every thing or nothing. The

subject-matter of Redgauntlet, or The Deformed Transformed (we take the last poem and novel respectively), if withdrawn from the mere composition of these two works, would leave their bulk apparently undiminished. A Review in one of our past numbers shows, that of The Deformed Transformed, the argument might, without a figure, be truly said to "lie in a nutshell;" and by a similar analysis we will now briefly demonstrate that the materiel out of which this threevolumed novel, Redgauntlet, is worked up, might with the utmost ease be confined within the same very limited space.

The hero, Darsie Latimer, of unauthenticated birth and country, goes a-fishing towards the Solway; being chiefly allured to the borders, by a sacred injunction which prohibits him from setting foot upon English ground, and being moreover permanently kept there by a friendly admonition from a young lady (Lilias, the heroine) that, if he valued his safety, he should immediately depart from the premises. A fisherman, who afterwards turns out to be a near relative of his own, and withal a great crony of the Pretender's (and who, by the bye, is the efficient hero of the novel), kidnaps our mock-hero, carries him over the Solway sands in a waggon, and shuts him up in an English farmhouse. He is soon after condemned to petticoats and a side-saddle, being compelled by his Great Unknown persecutor, the fisherman, to accompany him in this wise to another place of sojourn. He finds himself at length in a public-house kept by one Father Crackenthorpe, where he is introduced to Prince Charles Edward, as Sir Arthur Darsie Redgauntlet, the heir of the family of that name, by his uncle (the fisherman aforesaid), Hugh Redgauntlet, who is a zealous partizan of the Chevalier's, and who has endeavoured, though without success, to bring his nephew over to the side of the Royal Wanderer. To attain this latter purpose was our fisherman's grand reason for kidnapping his relative, over whose person he is supposed to enjoy a very arbitrary power as guardian, whilst that young hero remained at the English side of the Solway. The Crackenthorpe conspiracy, which comprised several English and Scottish gentle

men, is however put to the rout by the appearance of "Black Colin Campbell," and the red-coats from Carlisle; the Pretender, with his piscatory friend, embarks for Italy; and-and this is the sum and substance of the story.

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Now we undertake to say, that if the above paragraph were cut out from our page, and rolled up into a paper-pellet, these the solid contents of Redgauntlet would not be found to exceed in bulk the kernel of a moderately-sized and sincere Spanish nutshell. By the appendix, it is true, are informed that Lilias, who appears to be a sister of Darsie's, was married to his friend, Alan Fairford, Esquire, a young latitat of Edinburgh, who having heard of the kidnapping affair, breaks off a maiden cause in the middle, travels a great way both by land and sea, interrupts the narrative several times very impertinently, and creates a great deal of trouble and confusion, without accomplishing any thing else that we can perceive, throughout his whole existence in these volumes. He serves indeed as an apology for a lover to poor Lilias, who is, by the bye, a personage equally superfluous, and nearly as interesting as himself.

Taking these meagre details as his groundwork, the Author of Waverley has contrived to furnish out three very respectable volumes, one and a half of which, indeed, are dedicated to matters having nothing whatever to do with the main story. He, like his late noble competitor for the crown of fame, in his more recent works seems to have depended almost wholly on the qualification we noticed above, i. e. the power of writing ad infinitum, agreeably, upon any or no subject. And to say the truth, his dependance is seldom altogether misplaced. Though there may be less power of language, less condensation of incident, and less striking imagery, in Redgauntlet and its immediate predecessors, than in Waverley and its immediate successors, there is still enough of each, we are convinced, to save the former portion of our author's novels for ever from the pastry-cook and the trunkmaker.

But all-powerful as these two great writers may be considered, in the department of eloquence, and what may be generally described as

composition, they are both radically, though not perhaps equally, impotent in the province of character. There is but one character, variously modified by the different circumstances in which it is placed, throughout all Lord Byron's poems,—that of a noble-minded but depraved being, of fine feelings but irregular passions, more or less satirical and misanthropical in his disposition, gloomy, heart-withered, reckless, and irreligious. The Author of Waverley has taken a circle of somewhat greater circumference, but within which he is just as strictly confined. He has excogitated, or his experience has furnished him with, a certain definite number of characters, and these he plays as he would chess-men, sometimes bringing one forward, sometimes another, but without the power of increasing the number of men on the board.

Shakspeare, it may be said, has almost exhausted the kingdom of character; and an author who in the present age discovers a new one, merits the same honour as an astronomer who discovers a new planet. We do not know how this may be, but certainly the facility with which that author invented, and the rigour with which he preserved, characters, shames to nought the powers of the Author of Waverley, which we have heard as rashly as triumphantly compared to Shakspeare's in these particulars. The present volumes, for instance, develope not a single new character. They introduce us to several of our old acquaintances, with whose faces we are just as familiar as with that of the Man in the Moon, and which have appeared and reappeared almost as frequently, and to the full as unconcernedly with respect to all the sublunary dogs that bark at them, as that celestial physiognomy. First we have a hero and heroine of the genuine Waverley stamp; a pair, like which we hope Heaven will never make so many as the Great Unknown does, or the world would shortly be peopled with Albinos. Then follows the old litany of characters: a mysterieux, an urchin, a vagrant, a rolicking ne'er-dowell, a human blood-hound, and a " tedious old fool," in the persons of Hugh Redgauntlet, Little Benjie, Wandering Willie, Nanty Ewart,

Cristal Nixon, and Poor Peter Pee-
bles. Nota Bene: there is no weird
or wild woman in the whole story.
The place of a witch is supplied by
a Quaker, Joshua Geddes, whose
name is added to the dramatis persona
for the very important purpose of own-
ing a stake-net on the Solway, but who
nevertheless manages to occupy the
scene and crowd in at curtain-fall,
though he promotes the action of the
piece much about in the same ratio
that a midge bouncing against the
posterior part of the earth propels it
towards Aries. Indeed most of the
characters above-mentioned are su-
pernumeraries. Wandering Willie, a
blind fiddler, who promises, and from
whom we expect every moment,
great feats; who moreover goes so
far with the joke as to play, some-
what in the vein of Blondel, five
pages of Scotch tunes, under a pri-
son window; and who seems by this
means to hold the catastrophe, as it
were, in the belly of his instrument,
-after all, performs nothing more
worthy of immortality, than that of
warning the Crackenthorpe Cabal,
by an air, ("The Campbells are
coming,")—when it was exactly too
late to be of any service whatever,
Black Campbell entering the club-
room along with the music. Το
Little Benjie and Cristal Nixon,
deeds of equal moment are allotted;
the former carries a letter, and the
latter shoots a man; yet without any
further claims upon his favour, both
are perpetually thrust upon the at-
tention of the reader. Nanty Ewart
makes a voyage from Dumfries to
Cumberland, with Alan Fairford,
Esquire, as a passenger. Then there
are the said Alan Fairford, Esquire,
and his father, Alexander Fairford,
W. S. two gentlemen whom the read-
er is incessantly wishing at the very
last place to which he should like to
be consigned himself.

The adventures of Poor Peter Peebles are likewise a patch on the principal story, as tedious and impertinent an episode as any we ever met with in a Spanish novel. We do not deny that the character of this unfortunate litigant is well drawn, and that the state of moral as well as mental degradation to which the law's delay has reduced a respectable citizen, is depicted with affecting truthfulness. The original of this portrait, a miniature to be

sure, is to be found, if we rightly remember, in Peregrine Pickle, but the copy is worthy to supplant it in our memories. It is a draught in our author's best manner; and he has, with considerable skill heightened the simple effect which madness in misery would of itself produce on our feelings, by intermixing the crazy gravity of Poor Peter with something irresistibly ludicrous; so that the reader cannot easily tell whether the tear he feels rolling down his cheek, whilst the victim of Justice with earnest garrulity recites his disappointments and his future lofty hopes, be the result of laughter or of pity. The Baron of Bradwardine himself is not a sketch more felicitous than this:

You must have seen this original, Darsie,

who, like others in the same predicament, continues to haunt the courts of justice, where he has made shipwreck of time, means, and understanding. Such insane paupers have sometimes seemed to me to resemble wrecks lying upon the shoals on the Goodwin Sands, or in Yarmouth Roads, warning other vessels to keep aloof from the banks on which they have been lost; or rather scare-crows and potatoebogles, distributed through the courts to scare away fools from the scene of litigation.

The identical Peter wears a huge greatcoat, thread-bare and patched itself, yet carefully so disposed and secured by what buttons remain, and many supplementary pins, as to conceal the still more infirm state of his under garments. The shoes and stockings of a ploughman were, however, seen to meet at his knees, with a pair of brownish, blackish breeches; a rustycoloured handkerchief, that has been black in its day, surrounded his throat, and was an apology for linen. His hair, half grey, huge wig, made of tow, as it seemed to me, half black, escaped in elf-locks around a and so much shrunk, that it stood up on the very top of his head; above which he plants, when covered, an immense cocked hat, which, like the chieftain's banner, may be seen any sederunt day betwixt nine and ten, high towering above all the fluctuating and changeful scene in the Outer-House, where his eccentricities often make him the centre of a group of petulant and teazing boys, who exercise upon him every art of ingenious torment. ginally that of a portly, comely burgess, is now emaciated with poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by an insane lightness about the eyes; a withered and blighted skin and complexion; features charged with the self-importance peculiar to insanity; and a habit of perpetually speaking to

His countenance, ori

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