own notions on the subject: and here I cannot but notice the happy explanation which this hypothesis affords of that, otherwise extraordinary, anomaly, the application of the word taste metaphorically to express our judgments on the most intellectual compositions. In this respect, instinct has served us better than reason, which certainly would have suggested very different analogies.

There is, however, one mode of judgment, or if I may be allowed, one faculty more obviously connected with the stomach, and which admits of no mistake; I mean that faculty, which in its different applications is designated as faith, credulity, or cullibility. And first, it is impossible to overlook the leading fact that John Bull, who is notorious for his facile credence of every cock-andbull story, of a minister of finance or a newspaper editor, a sea-serpent, a fasting-woman, or a Cock-lane ghost, is at the same time remarkable for his substantial feeding. So also the able-bodied seamen, who think a certain part of their crew mere fruges consumere nati on board a ship, regularly consign all exaggerated narratives and incredible propositions to their "willing ears," according to nostrum illud solenne, "You may tell that to the marines."

Thus also the rosy gills, and "fair round bellies with good capon lined," of our orthodox professors and fellows of colleges, when contrasted with the lantern jaws and mortified flanks of schismatics and sectarians, speak volumes in favour of the doctrine I advance; and it is in this point that the whole "vis" lies of Hudibras's remark:

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year.And that which was proved true before Prove false again?-Two hundred more. It is indeed impossible to attach any meaning to this passage other than that a difference in the rate of feeding occasions a difference in the intellectual faculties, and the patient is stimulated to different degrees of faith, according to the quantum of spice he can afford to put in his cookery. This too was the opinion of that great moral philosopher Paley, who objected to an unreasonable Bishop that it was not just to try the faith of a parish priest of six hundred a year, by that of a church dignitary of

six thousand.

Here also we have the physiological explanation of that melancholy influence which place and pension exercises

on the credulity of senators, and which compels them to place implicit credit in the heaven-born minister for the time being. It explains too, in the shortest possible manner, why extreme inequalities of condition are unfavourable to the peace and harmony of society; the various feeding of the several classes setting their opinions (i. e. stomachs) to such various keys, that Beethoven with all the dieses in the world could not reduce them into any reasonable tune. Thus in our own times we have seen Cobbett relaxed to a minor third or a sharp second; the Courier mounted by an imperceptible improvement in the last quarter's revenue to a sharp sixth; the corruptionists in the dominant, the Manchester magistrates in the supertonic, and all the contributors to the poor-rates full three commas below concert-pitch. Then again what a horrible discord do the manufacturers and agriculturists make with the cornbill, because, by a strange contradiction, the more there is to eat, the less chance some people have of getting a belly full.

But quorsum hæc tam putida? you will say. Simply to this, that in all wise governments the first care of the police should be to have an eye to the kitchens of the community; to note down as jacobinical all houses whose chimneys emit no smoke; and to keep an eye upon such as are bad customers to the butcher and baker. Prevention, however, is not all. I would, in order to produce a desirable uniformity of opinion, open a certain number of cookshops in every parish, and multiply civic feasts to the utmost limits of possibility. The Romans were governed by panem et circenses; and Louis XVIII. knows no better means of de-jacobinizing his subjects than the periodical establishment of Mâts de Cocagne, with donatives of wine and eleemosynary tongues and sausages. The efficacy of this plan is well known to electioneers; and, in private life, every Amphitryon employs it in composing the society of his table to an unison with his own notions. But above all, I would recommend it to the proprietor of the New Monthly Magazine, to act vigorously on the stomachs of his tributary authors, in order to maintain unabated the literary reputation of his wide-spreading miscellany; and, in the hope that I may participate in the effects of this stimulant system, I remain, his and the reader's obedient servant.

ON THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES BROWN, THE AMERICAN NOVELIST.

THE reputation of an author is seldom justly proportioned to his merit. For the last seventeen years our circulating libraries have contained several novels by C. B. Brown, an American author of whose existence we were ignorant (and this ignorance, we have reason to suspect, is pretty general) until an accident lately led us to the perusal of some of his works yet, if Wieland, or Arthur Mervyn, or Edgar Huntly, were now to be for the first time ushered into the world with some such magical addition as "by the Author of Waverley" in the title-page, we doubt not that every reader would be in raptures with their beauties, and every babbling critic tendering his tributary stream of shallow adiniration of the writer's powers. But it was the fate of those works, when first reprinted in this country, to issue from one of the common reservoirs of sentimental trash, and, consequently, (as we imagine) to share in the general contempt attached to those poor productions, which, like the redundant and needy members of a great house, have nothing but sounding titles to sustain them. The genius of the man certainly deserved a different destinyand, though he is now beyond the reach of human praise, we feel irresistibly impelled," even in his grave, to do him justice." We believe that this sentiment is not exclusively confined to ourselves, and that ere long the public attention will be called to the same subject in more detail than our present limits can afford.

Brown's novels are of a very peculiar kind, and afford a singular example of the successful application of certain principles of effect (manifestly borrowed from a distinguished writer of our own country), by which our attention is at the outset powerfully raised, and our sympathy during the entire progress of the work intensely fixed upon persons who are rendered interesting, not so much from their individual qualifica tions, as from the strange situations in which a fatal series of untoward accidents has involved them. This mode of arresting the reader's interest and cu

The following remarks apply only to the three already named. We have not perused the others. Their titles are "Ormond," "Jane Talbot," and "Clara Howard." They have been represented as considerably inferior to the three first.

NEW MONTHLY MAG.-No. 83.

riosity, is more or less adopted in every work of fiction-but the first time that it was systematically employed as the mainspring of the interest as the general pervading principle of the wholewas (as far as our knowledge of such productions extends) in Godwin's " Adventures of Caleb Williams." And we are far from meaning to detract from the author's originality, when we express our opinion, that the artifice in question was not resorted to in consequence of any previous design, but suggested itself in the course of the details as an obvious and indeed almost inevitable inference from the more comprehensive moral and political purpose of his work.

The professed object of " Caleb Williams" was to give a strong picture of the "modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism," of which, in defiance of the boasted free spirit of our institutions, an innocent person may be rendered the victim. For this purpose it would have been easy to have selected examples of flagrant and not improbable injustice. Caleb Williams, having become the object of his master's vengeance, might have been summarily disposed of. He might, by Falkland's contrivances, have been immured for life in the cells of a private mad-house-or, on his false accusations, have been brought to suffer the utmost penalty of the laws against convicted criminals. The mind of every reader will suggest many similar expedients-but such atrocities of revenge, though strictly illustrative of the writer's object, would, if confined to a single instance, have rendered the continued support of the interest a task of extraordinary difficulty or if multiplied without reserve, would have been so harassing and improbable as to shock the reader's taste and judgment. In order, therefore, to reconcile the general scope of his work with the order of natural events, and with the interest indispensable in fictitious narrative, the author very judiciously selected a tale of oppression, in which the physical suffering is for the most part incidental and unintended by the oppressor-where our sympathy and indignation are excited, not so much by any gross palpable acts of vindictive power, as by the victim's persevering but unsuccessful efforts to evade them-and by the impassioned workings of his mind upon the strange complexities of feeling and VOL. XIV.

4 I

situation in which those efforts involve him.

The character of Williams, in itself, has nothing very extraordinary or admirable. He is a young man of moderate capacity, and homely habits and education. Whatever energies he displays are rather muscular than intellectualbut we follow his narrative with the most intense and unintermitted interest and expectation, because, throughout, his breast is a theatre of vehement conflict and debate, as each vicissitude of circumstance suggests a train of contradictory emotions. His first suspicions and discovery that the accomplished Falkland is a murderer!-his contrasted feelings of horror at the crime, and of pity and habitual veneration for the perpetrator-his intolerance of the tyrannical but necessary restraints imposed by his master-his flight as if he were the criminal-his arrest and imprisonment on the false charge of robbing Falkland his appeal to Falkland on that occasion-his plans of escape and their execution-his subsequent disguises to evade pursuit-his hiding behind a hedge to avoid Falkland's carriage-his reading the handbill offering a reward for his own apprehension by the light of a lamp in the streets of London-these, and the other principal incidents in the novel, may be referred to as so many instances where the facts related affect us, not as novel or peculiarly interesting occurrences, but as excitants of the most impassioned and varied emotions in the bosom of the narrator. These remarks do not extend to the general character of Falklandone of the finest and most original conceptions of modern literature-nor to the description of Tyrrel-nor to the affecting episodes of the fates of Emily Melville and the Hawkinses-but certainly, as far as our sympathy for Caleb Williams is concerned, the external events he passed through, would never have obtained such a grasp of our imagination, had it not been for the deep conAlict of passions within, to which they are made subservient, and of which the spirited and elaborate analysis forms the principal attraction of his story.

We have found it necessary to premise these observations upon "Caleb Williams," because we conceive that the peculiarities just adverted to in that celebrated work, form a complete key

to the prevailing style and manner of the novels of Brown*. The subject matter of the latter is indeed widely different, as is also their philosophical tendency-still, not only has the American made use of the same modes of chaining down the reader's attention, and of harassing him with every passion that agitated the fictitious personages, so successfully adopted by Godwin, but he has caught the tone and style of his model, even in the minutest peculiarities, with a spirit and accuracy that really looks more like identity than imitation. We must, however, add that this imitation (though inveterately persevered in throughout) is managed with all the ease, and skill, and copiousness of an original manner. Certainly the English seed has not degenerated in the foreign soil on which it has fallen. We should rather say, that in its transplanted growth it displays much of that bursting energy of vegetation, and often expands into all that transatlantic wildness and profusion, which we associate with the productions of the younger hemisphere. But what renders Brown the most singular and original of imita tors, is that, notwithstanding his pertinacious predilection for the phraseology and manner of another, he has in no instance betrayed any disposition to adopt that person's speculative views of human affairs. He appears to have instinctively seized the secret of Godwin's power, and to have used it as freely and familiarly as if he were the rightful owner; but the views and purposes to which he has applied it, have not the remotest connexion with those of which it was originally made the vehicle-so that, looking at those novels in this single point of view, and without any reference to their more general merits, we cannot help pronouncing them to be a very singular literary curiosity. They are, besides, almost the only American productions of the kind with which we are acquainted; and, as nearly all the personages and events are American, we have considered them as so many experimental specimens of its native materials for fictitious composition-and in this view have found in their perusal a peculiar source of interest, which has probably been lost upon those more familiarly conversant with the habits and manners of American society.

* Wieland, the first of the series, was published in 1798, four years after the appearance of Godwin's novel.