ate; and this, as well as the character of the principal personage,

"Link'd with one virtue, and a thousand crimes,"

reminds us, in reading Anastasius,' very strongly of the manner of Lord Byron. Indeed, this romance is very much what Byron would have written in prose-the same splendid, vivid, and ever-fresh pictures of the external nature of the most beautiful and interesting region of the world, the same intensity of passion, the same gloomy colouring of unrepenting crime.

But if the darker side of Oriental nature be presented to us in 'Vathek' and 'Anastasius,' in the former combined with the caustic irony of Voltaire, in the second with the mournful grandeur of Byron, the Hajji Baba' of Morier will make us ample amends in drollery and a truly comic verve. This is the Gil Blas' of Oriental life. 6 Hajji Baba is a barber of Ispahan, who passes through a long but delightfully varied series of adventures, such as happen in the despotic and simple governments of the East, where the pipe-bearer of one day may become the vizier of the next. The hero is an easy, merry good-for-nothing, whose dexterity and gaiety it is impossible not to admire, even while we rejoice in the punishment which his manifold rascalities draw down upon him; and perhaps there is no work in the world which gives so vast, so lively, and so accurate a picture of every grade, every phase of Oriental existence. Mr. Morier, who resided nearly all his life in various parts of the East, and whose long sojourn as British minister in Persia made him profoundly acquainted with the character of the people of that country, has most inimitably sustained his imaginary personage. The Hajji is not only a thorough Oriental, but intensely Persian, and a Persian of the lower class into the bargain; a perfect specimen of his nation—the French of the East-gay, talkative, dexterous, vain, enterprising, acute, not over scrupulous, but always amusing. The worthy Hajji, in the continuation of the story, comes to England in the suite of an embassy from "the asylum of the universe;" and perhaps nothing was ever more truly natural and comic than the way in which he relates his impressions and adventures in this country, his surprise at the condition of women among us, his admiration of the

"moonfaces," and, above all, his astonished wonder at the "Coompany," the great enigma to all Orientals.

Naval and

novels.

i

It now remains only to speak of one species of prose fictionthat which has for its subject the manners and personages of marine or military life. It may military easily be conceived that, the former service being most entwined with all the sympathies of the national heart, the subdivision of marine novels should be the richest. The contrary might be naturally expected in France; and in France we accordingly find that though, particularly in modern times, numerous novelists have endeavoured to put in a picturesque and attractive light the manners and scenes of a sea-life, yet that it is the army which has supplied popular literature-the novel, the chanson, and the vaudeville-with the types of character most identified with the national feeling and predilection. What the militaire is to the French public, the sailor is to the English: in the songs of the people, on their stage, in their favourite books, the "Jack Tar," the "old Agamemnon" who followed Nelson to the Nile, is as perpetually recurring and indispensable a personage as the "vieux moustache," the "grogneur de la vieille garde," to the French. And this is natural enough. Each country is peculiarly proud of that class to which it owes its brightest and least disputable glory as the Frenchman naturally hugs himself in the idea that France is incontestably the first military nation in the world, so the Englishman, no less naturally, is peculiarly vain of his country's naval achievements; not that in either case the former at all forgets or undervalues the naval triumphs of his flag, or the latter the military exploits of his; but simply because France is not essentially maritime, and England is, and therefore the natives of each attach themselves to that species of glory which they consider the peculiar property of their nation.

Marryat.

At the head of our marine novelists stands Captain Marryat, one of the most easy, lively, and truly humorous story-tellers we possess. One of the chief elements of his talent is undoubtedly the tone of high, effervescent, irrepressible animal spirits which characterizes everything he has written. He seems as if he sate down to

compose without having formed the least idea of what he is going to say, and sentence after sentence seems to flow from his pen without thought, without labour, and without hesitation. He seems half tipsy with the very gaiety of his heart, and never scruples to introduce the most grotesque extravagances of character, language, and event, provided they are likely to excite a laugh. This would produce absurdity and failure as often as laughter were it not that he has a natural tact and judgment in the ludicrous; and this happy audacity this hit-or-miss boldness serves him admirably well. Nothing can surpass the liveliness and drollery of his 'Peter Simple,' Jacob Faithful,' or 'Mr. Midshipman Easy;' what an inexhaustible gallery of originals has he paraded before us! The English national temperament has a peculiar tendency to produce eccentricity of manner, and a sea-life in particular seems calculated to foster these oddities till they burst into full blow and luxuriance. Marryat's narratives are exceedingly inartificial, and often grossly improbable; but we read on with gay delight, never thinking of the story, but only solicitous to follow the droll adventures, and laugh at the still droller characters. Smollett himself has nothing richer than Captain Kearney, with his lies and innocent ostentation; Captain To, with his passion for pig, his lean wife and her piano; or than Mr. Easy fighting his ship under a green petticoat for want of an ensign. This author has also a peculiar talent for the delineation of boyish characters: his Faithful and Peter Simple (the "fool of the family ") not only amuse but interest us; and in many passages he has shown no mean mastery over the pathetic emotions. Though superficial in his view of character, he is generally faithful to reality, and shows an extensive if not very deep knowledge of what his old waterman calls "human natur.” There are few authors more amusing than Marryat: his books have the effervescence of champagne.

Captains Glasscock and Chamier, Mr. Howard and Mr. Trelawney, have also produced naval fictions of merit: the two last authors have followed a more tragic path than the others mentioned above, and have written passages of great power and impressiveness; but their works are injured by a

too frequent occurrence of exaggerated pictures of blood and horror a fatal fault, from which they might have been warned by the example of Eugène Sue.

The tales called 'Tom Cringle's Log' and 'The Cruize of the Midge' are also works in this kind (though not exclusively naval) of striking brilliancy and imaginative power. In these we have a most gorgeously coloured and faithful delineation of the luxuriant scenery of the West Indian Archipelago, and the manners of the creole and colonist population are reproduced with consummate drollery and inexhaustible splendour of language. They were the production of Mr. Scott, a gentleman engaged in commerce, and personally familiar with the scenes he described; and the admiration they excited at their first appearance (anonymously) in 'Blackwood's Magazine' caused them to be ascribed to the pen of some of the most distinguished of living writers, particularly to that of John Wilson, the editor of the journal.

Of the military novels we have but a few words to say: they are generally inferior to the same class of works in France. Mr. Gleig has recorded in a narrative form many striking episodes of that "war of giants" whose most glorious and terrific scenes were the lines of Torres Vedras, the storm of Badajoz, and the field of Waterloo; and a number of younger authors, chiefly Irishmen, as Messrs. Lever and Lover, have detailed with their national vivacity the grotesque oddities and gay bravery of their countrymen, who never appear to so much advantage as on the field of battle.

CHAPTER XX.

THE STAGE AND JOURNALISM.

Comedy in England-Congreve, Farquhar, &c.-Sheridan-The Modern Romantic Drama—Oratory in England: Burke-Letters of Junius— Modern Theologians: Paley and Butler-Blackstone-Adam Smith -Metaphysics: Stewart-Bentham-Periodicals: the Newspaper, the Magazine, and the Review-The Quarterly, and Blackwood-The Edinburgh, and the New Monthly-The Westminster Cheap Periodical Literature.

COMEDY is essentially the expression not of Life, but of Comedy in Society. It does not deal with the passions, but

England. with the affectations and follies of our nature: it belongs, therefore, particularly to a highly civilized and artificial state of existence. Many of Shakspeare's most humorous creations are comic in the highest degree, but they are not in any sense comedies: they are something infinitely more elevated, more profound, more far-reaching; but they are not comedies. Exquisitely humorous as they are, the humour is not in them the primary element, the unmixed subject-matter of these inimitable delineations; it is united with tenderness, romantic passion, exhaustless poetic fancy; and therefore we call them Plays. Indeed, it may almost be maintained that humour is not the true element of comedy at all—that is, of comedy properly so named. Wit is the essence, the lifeblood of comedy, and wit is as different from humour as from tragic passion. Wit is the negative, the destructive process— humour the positive, the reconstructive. Wit is an analytic, humour a synthetic operation. The latter indeed is so demonstrably a higher power of the mind, that it includes the former, but with the addition of something more, and something, too, infinitely higher in its source and nature. The humorist must possess wit; but he must also possess tenderness, sympathy, love. In the language of algebra we may