the traditions of the surrounding country, collected by Sir John Sinclair, and which prove that the poet exclusively availed himself of them. These tradítions alledge, that Macbeth, in obedience to the commands of two witches, erected his fortress of Dunsinnan, a name signifying ant-hill, which it received in allusion to the industry and labour of the men who were employed in building it. From this fort he saw Malcolm advance with his English and Scotch troops, who, to ornament their caps, had cut down boughs from the trees in Birnam-wood. Seized with alarm, he rushed out, and was killed by Macduff, at a short distance from the fort. A mound of earth, in the neighbourhood of Dunsinnan, is still pointed out as the grave of the tall man, for Macbeth is supposed to have been of gigantic stature; and near it is the spot where Banquo was murdered by order of Macbeth. The similarity between this popular tradition and Shakspeare's story, would lead one to imagine that the poet had collected the materials of his tragedy on this very spot. This supposition is strengthened by what Guthrie says in his History of Scotland, namely, "that, in the year 1599, King James requested Queen Elizabeth to send him a company of players, which she did." He adds, that he has great reason to believe, the immortal Shakspeare was among the number.

II now left the hills and entered the Lowlands at Perth, about eleven miles from Birnam-wood. Tacitus has recorded the exclamation of the Roman troops under Agricola, who, as they approached the enchanting banks of the Tay, in an extacy of admiration uttered the words, "Ecce Tiberim!" The country hereabouts presents the hilly aspect of the Campagna di Roma; the serpentine course of the Tay, bounded by Kinnout Craigs, calls to mind the windings of the Tiber at Ponte Molle; and the beautiful form of Kinnout resembles that of Monte Mario. Perth is not an unimportant place; its population amounts to 12,000, and its flourishing manufactures, extensive salmon-fishery, and improved agriculture, render it a very wealthy town. During the summer season it is the resort of strangers, who throng here and to Dunkeld, to enjoy the scenery of two of the loveliest spots in Scotland. Perth was once the favourite residence of the Scottish kings, and in its vicinity stood the celebrated Scone Castle, at which they were crown

ed. On the site of the old castle and abbey, which was burnt by the Reformers, Lord Mansfield has erected an extensive palace in the Gothic style, so greatly admired by the English. The edifice, however, owes its effect chiefly to its vast magnitude, the beautiful stone employed in building it, and the fine park and plantations by which it is surrounded. At Perth I became acquainted with a Scotch gardener, who invited me to visit him. The Scotch gardeners are accounted the most skilful in Great Britain for the cultivation of fruits. My new acquaintance shewed me a number of hot-houses, which, in all seasons of the year, produce abundance of fruit. I now understood how it happened, that when I was in Edinburgh, I could purchase the most exquisite fruits at a comparatively moderate price. All the Scotch nobility and persons of fortune have extensive hot-houses in their orchards, which, owing to the abundance of fuel, are maintained at a very trifling expense; and as most great families were at that period travelling on the Continent, fruit was not only sent in abundance to the Edinburgh market, but also shipped for London. English capital, indeed, receives many dainties from the sister country; and since it has become so common a practice to send salmon from Scotland to London, the Scotch servant-maids no longer find it necessary to stipulate with their masters that they shall not be obliged to eat salmon more than five times a week.

The

I had become too much attached to the Highland hills to take the straight course from Perth to Edinburgh, and I determined to cross them in a direction from East to West. I accordingly proceeded by the way of Crief and Comrie to Loch Ernehead, passing the Trossachs a second time, and then crossing Aberfoil to Loch Lomond. I was delighted at being able to tarry for five days longer among the hills; and when on my departure from Loch Lomond I gradually approached the low country, felt the full force of Burns's lines:

"Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birthplace of valour, the country of worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love."

I pursued my course along the river Leven, which flows from Loch Lomond into the Clyde; and the nearer I approached Dumbarton the more striking was the change in the surrounding

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scenery. Instead of the dark and soli, tary hills which I had left in the morning, I found myself transported into the busiest quarter of the Lowlands; instead of fog and mist the atmosphere was obscured by the smoke of steam-engines and manufactories, over the gates of which were inscribed in large letters the words," No admittance." Smollet, who lived on the banks of the Leven, near the spot where his monument is now erected, has written an ode on this delightful district; it is introduced in his Humphry Clinker," a novel which af fords a most animated picture of Scotland. The fortress of Dumbarton, in the vicinity of the town of the same name, is the strongest, and, in point of situation, the most picturesque, in Scotland. The castle stands on a high biforkated basalt rock, connected with the shore only at a very small point, while it is three parts surrounded by the Frith of Clyde, into which the Leven disembogues itself near this spot. It would be difficult to find in any part of the world a steeper or more singularly formed rock than this. In the cleft between its two summits stands the main part of the fortress; the steps leading to it are cut in the rock, which has in many places a magnetic power. The sword of Wallace is kept in Dumbarton castle, and certainly no fitter place could be chosen to deposit a memorial of Scotland's deliverer than this, which was the scene of his heroic achievements.

Glasgow is about fifteen miles distant from Dumbarton; in respect to population, wealth, and extensive trade, it deserves to be called the capital of Scotland; it, however, presents but few attractions to those who have seen the principal manufacturing towns in England. Some notion of the extensive

trade of Glasgow may be formed from the number of steam-boats which, daily sail along the Clyde to Greenock, and thence to the towns situated on the in lets of the Atlantic, as well as to the islands of Bute and Arran. Every day, about twelve of these boats arrive and depart, filled with passengers, and furnished with the best accommodation The passage along the Firth of Clyde is even more interesting than that on the Firth of Forth; on the left bank of the river are situated the most important manufacturing towns in Scotland, name-/ ly, Renfrew, Paisley, and Port-Glasgow, and the rock of Dumbarton, projecting above the water, forms one of the grandest objects I ever beheld. Great caution is observed with respect to steam-boats in Scotland, where they have seldom been known to occasion any accident. They certainly are not very carefully managed in England, for while I was in London, the boiler burst on board of the very boat in which I had sailed to Rich mond only a few days previously; three men were killed by the accident. Shortly after one of the Gravesend boats also blew up.

The cheapest and most agreeable mode of travelling from Edinburgh to London is by sea, on board one of the smacks four or five of which sail weekly from Leith. Owing to the competition of several Companies, who are the proprietors of these smacks, the price of the passage is at present reduced to three guineas. The passengers experience the best accommodation, and the vessels, which are constructed for swift sailing are manned with the most skilful sear men. I sailed to London, on board a Leith smack, at the latter end of September; and in the following month returned to the Continent...

THE author of Montorio and of Bertram is unquestionably a person gifted with no ordinary powers. He has a quick sensibility-a penetrating and intuitive acuteness--and an unrivalled vigour and felicity of language, which enable him at one time to attain the happiest condensation of thought, and at others to pour forth a stream of eloquence rich, flowing, and deep, chequer ed with images of delicate loveliness, or darkened by broad shadows cast from objects of stern and adamantine majesty,

Yet, in common with many other tent spirits of the present time, he fails to excite within us any pure and lasting sympathy. We do not, on reading its works, feel that we have entered on a precious and imperishable treasure, They dazzle, they delight, they surprise, and they weary us-we lay them down, with a vague admiration for the author, and try to shake off their influence as we do the impressions of a feverish dream. It is not thus that we receive the productions of genuine and holy

bards of Shakspeare, wof Milton; of Spenser, or of Wordsworth-whose far reaching imaginations come home to our hearts, who become the companions of our sweetest moods, and with whom web long to set up our everlasting rest. Their creations are often nearest to our hearts when they are furthest re moved from the actual experience of our lives! We travel on the bright tracts which their genius reveals to us as safely and with as sure and fond a tread as along the broad highway of the world. When the regions which they set before us are the most distant from our ordinary perceptions, we yet seem at home in them, their wonders are strangely familiar to us, and the scene, overspread with a consecrating and lovely lustre, breaks on us, not as a wild fantastic novelty, but as a revived recollection of some holier life, which the soul rejoices thus delightfully to recognize.

Not thus do the works of Mr. Ma turin original and surprising as they often are affect us. They have no fibres in them which entwine with the heartstrings, and which keep their hold until the golden chords of our sensibility and imagination themselves are broken. They pass by us sometimes like gorgeous phantoms, sometimes like "horrible shadows and unreal mockeries," which seem to elude us because they are not of us. When we follow him closest, he introduces us into a region where all is unsatisfactory and unreal-the chaos of principles, fancies, and passions-where mightiest elements are yet floating without order, where appearances between substance and shadow perpetually harass us, where visionary forms beckon us through painful avenues, and on approach sink into despicable realities, and pillars which looked ponderous and immoveable at a distance, melt at the touch into air, and are found to be only masses of vapour and of cloud. He neither raises us to the skies, nor "brings his angels down," but astonishes by a phantasmagoria of strange appearances, sometimes scarcely distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, but which when most clearly defined come not near us, nor claim kindred by a warm and living touch. This chill remoteness from humanity is attended by a general want of harmony and proportion in the whole-by a wild excursiveness of sensibility and thought which add to its ungenial influence, and may be traced to the same causes.

If we were disposed to refer these de

feets to one general source, we should attribute them to the want of an imagi-' nation proportionate to sensibility and to mastery of language in the writer's mind, or to his comparative neglect of that most divine of human faculties. It' is edifying to observe how completely the nature of this power is mistaken by many who profess to decide on matters of taste. They regard it as something wild and irregular, the reverse of truth, nature, and reason, which is divided from insanity only by a thin partition," and which, uncontrouled by sterner powers, forms the essence of madness. They think it abounds in the speeches of Mr. Phillips, because they are so crowded with tawdry and superfluous epithets in the discourses of Doctor Chalmers, because they deal so largely in infinite obscurities that there is no room for a single image-and in the poems of Lord Byron, because his characters are so unlike all beings which have ever existed. Far otherwise thought Spenser when he represented the laurel as the meed-not of poets insane-but "of poets SAGE." Pure imagination is, indeed, the deep eye of the profoundest wisdom. It is opposed to reason not in its results, but in its process; it does not demonstrate truth only because it' sees it. There are vast and eternal realities in our nature, which reason proves to exist-which sensibility" feels after and finds" and which imagination beholds in clear and solemn vision, and pictures with a force and vividness which assures their existence even to ungifted mortals. Its subjects are the true, the universal, and the lasting. Its distinguishing property has no relation to dimness, or indistinctness, or dazzling radiance, or turbulent confusedness, but is the power of setting all things in the clearest light, and bringing them into perfect harmony. Like the telescope it does not only magnify celestial objects, but brings them nearer to us. Of all the faculties, it is the severest and the most unerring. Reason may beguile with splendid sophistry; sensibility may fatally misguide; but if imagination exists at all, it must exhibit only the real. A mirror can no more reflect an object which is not before it, than the imagination can shew the false and the baseless. By revealing to us its results in the language of imagery, it gives to them almost the evidence of the senses. If the analogy between an idea and its physical, exponent is not complete, there is no

effort of imagination-if it is, the truth is seen, and felt, and enjoyed, like the colours and forms of the material uni verse. And this effect is produced not only with the greatest possible certainty, but in the fewest possible words. Yet even when this is done-when the illustration is not only the most enchant ing, but the most convincing, of proofs -the writer is too often contemptuously depreciated as flowery, by the advocates of mere reason. Strange chance! that he who has embodied truth in a living image, and thus rendered it visible to the intellectual perceptions, should be confounded with those who conceal all sense and meaning beneath mere verbiage and fragments of disjointed metaphor!

Thus the products of genuine imagination are all compact." It is, indeed, only the compactness and har mony of its pictures which give to it its name or its value. To discover that there are mighty elements in humanity -to observe that there are bright hues and graceful forms in the external world and to know the fitting names of these is all which is required to furnish out a rich stock of spurious imagination to one who aspires to the claim of a wild and irregular genius. For him a dictionary is a sufficient guide to Parnassus. It is only by representing those intellectual elements in their finest harmony-by combining those hues and forms in the fairest pictures-or by making the glorious combinations of external things the symbols of truth and moral beauty-that imagination really puts forth its divine energies. We do not charge on Mr. Maturin that he is destitute of power to do this, or that he does not sometimes direct it to its purest uses. But his sensibility is so much more quick and subtle, than his authority over his impressions is complete; the flow of his words so much more copious and facile than the throng of images on his mind; that he too often confounds us with unnumbered snatches and imperfect gleams of beauty, or astonishes us by an outpouring of eloquent bombast, instead of enriching our souls with distinct and vivid conceptions. Like many other writers of the present time especially of his own country-he does not wait until the stream which young enthusiasm sets loose shall work itself clear, and calmly reflect the highest heavens. His creations bear any stamp but that of truth and soberness. He sees the glories of the external world, and the mightier wonders of man's

moral and intellectual nature, with a quick sense, and feels them with an exquisite sympathy-but he gazes on them in "very drunkenness of heart," and becomes giddy with his own indistinct emotions, till all things seem confounded in a gay bacchanalian dance, and assume strange fantastic combinations; which, when transferred to his works, startle for a moment, but do not produce that "sober certainty of waking bliss" which real imagination assures. There are two qualities necessary to form a truly imaginative writer a quicker and an intenser feeling than ordinary men possess for the beautiful and the sublime, and the calm and me ditative power of regulating, combining, and arranging its own impressions, and of distinctly bodying forth the final results of this harmonizing process. Where the first of these properties exists, the last is perhaps attainable by that deep and careful study which is more necessary to a poet than to any artist who works in mere earthly materials. But this study many of the most gifted of modern writers unhappily disdain; and if mere sale and popularity are their ob jects, they are right; for in the multitude the wild, the disjointed, the incoherent, and the paradoxical, which are but for a moment, necessarily awaken more immediate sensation than the pure and harmonious, which are destined to last while nature and the soul shall endure.

It is easy to perceive how it is that the imperfect creations of men of sensibility and of eloquence strike and dazzle more at the first, than the completest works of truly imaginative poets. A perfect statue-a temple fashioned with exactest art appear less, at a mere glance, from the nicety of their proportions. The vast majority of readers, in an age like our's, have neither leisure nor taste to seek and ponder over the effusions of holiest genius. They must be awakened into admiration by something new, and strange, and surprising; and the more remote from their daily thoughts and habits-the more fantastical and daring-the effort, the more will it please, because the more will it rouse them. Thus a man who will exhibit some impossible combination of heroism and meanness

of virtue and of vice of heavenly love and infernal malignity and baseness-will receive their wonder and their praise. They call this POWER, which is in reality the most pitiable

weakness. It is because a writer has not imagination enough to exhibit in new forms the universal qualities of nature and the soul, that he takes some strange and horrible anomaly as his theme. Incompetent to the divine task of rendering beauty" a simple product of the common day," he tries to excite emotion by disclosing the foulest recess of the foulest heart. As he strikes only one feeling, and that coarsely and ungently, he appears to wield a mightier weapon than he whose harmonious beauty sheds its influence equably over the whole of the sympathies. That which touches with strange commotion, and mere violence on the heart, but leaves no image there, seems to vulgar spirits more potent than the faculty which applies to it all perfect figures, and leaves them to sink gently into its fleshly tablets to remain there for ever. Yet surely that which merely shakes is not equal even in power to that which impresses. The wild disjointed part may be more amazing to a diseased perception than the well-compacted whole; but it is the nice balancing of properties, the soft blending of shades, and the all-pervading and reconciling light shed over the harmonious imagination, which take off the sense of rude strength that alone is discernible in its naked elements. Is there more of heavenly power in seizing from among the tumult of chaos and eternal night, strange and fearful abortions, or in brooding over the vast abyss, and making it pregnant with life, and glory, and joy? Is it the higher exercise of human faculties to represent the frightful discordances of passion, or to show the grandeurs of humanity in that majestic repose which is at once an anticipation and a proof of its eternal destiny? Is transitory vice-the mere accident of the species-and those vices too which are the rarest and most appalling of all its accidents or that good which is its essence and which never can perish, fittest for the uses of the bard? Shall he desire to haunt the caves which lie lowest on the banks of Acheron, or the soft bowers watered by "Siloa's brook that flows fast by the oracle of God"?

7

Mr. Maturin gave decisive indications of a morbid sensibility and a passionate eloquence outrunning his imaginative faculties, in the commencement of his literary career. His first romance, the "Family of Montorio," is one of the wildest and strangest of all "false creations proceeding from the heat-oppressed NEW MONTHLY MAG.-No. 79.

brain." It is for the most part a tissue of magnificent yet unappalling horrors. Its great faults, as a work of amusement, are the long and unrelieved series of its gloomy and marvellous scenes, and the unsatisfactory explanation of them all, as arising from mere human agency. This last error he borrowed from Mrs. Ratcliffe, to whom he is far inferior in the economy of terrors, but whom he greatly transcends in the dark majesty of his style. As his events are far more wild and wondrous than hers, so his developement is necessarily far more incredible and vexatious. There is, in this story, a being whom we are long led to believe is not of this world-who speaks in the tones of the sepulchre, glides through the thickest walls, haunts two distant brothers in their most secret retirements through their strange wanderings, leads one of his victims to a scene which he believes infernal, and there terrifies him with sights of the wildest magic-and who after all this, and after really vindicating to the fancy his claim to the supernatural by the fearful cast of his language is discovered to be a low impostor, who has produced all by the aid of poor tricks and secret passages! Where is the policy of this? Unless by his power, the author had given a credibility to magic through four-fifths of his work, it never could have excited any feeling but that of impatience or of scorn. And when we have surrendered ourselves willingly to his guidance-when we have agreed to believe impossibilities at his biddingwhy does he reward our credence with derision, and tacitly reproach us for not having detected his idle mockeries? After all, too, the reason is no more satisfied than the fancy; for it would be a thousand times easier to believe in the possibility of spiritual influences, than in a long chain of mean contrivances, no one of which could ever succeed. The first is but one wonder, and that one to which our nature has a strange leaning; the last are numberless, and have nothing to reconcile them to our thoughts. In submitting to the former we contentedly lay aside our reasoning faculties; in approaching the latter our reason itself is appealed to at the moment when it is insulted. Great talent is, however, unquestionably exhibited in this singular story. A stern justice breathes solemnly through all the scenes in the devoted castle. "Fate sits on its dark battlements, and frowns." There is a spirit of deep philosophy in the tracing VOL. XIV.

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