ART. X.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.-Percival Keene-A Novel. By CAPT. MARRYATT. Harper & Brothers. New-York: 1842.

THE fictions of Bulwer, James, and other novelists of less note, have of late followed each other with such fearful rapidity, that Capt. Marryat has been, for some time, thrown very much into the shade, and almost forgotten. Another cause has, perhaps, added materially to the indifference latterly felt about his works. His Diary in America placed him in such bad odour, and so far diminished his popularity, that even his novels appeared to fall immediately into disrepute. Persons that had before lauded him to the skies, almost instantaneously discovered that he was a man of no talent; those who had revelled over his pages, delighting in their racy humor, found the scales suddenly fall from their eyes, and discovered at once, by a species of inspiration, that they were low, vulgar, obscene and intolerable. This was all perfectly natural. The reputation or disfavor of a work is not usually confined to itself, but extends in a greater or less degree to all the other productions of the same author, however unjust it may be that the sins of the guilty should be visited on the heads of the innocent. We expect to find the same results in the case of Dickens: we do not think that the Cherryble Brothers, Little Nell, and Mr. Pickwick will be able to ward off from Nicholas Nickleby, Master Humphrey's Clock, and the Pickwick Papers, the odium which has attached to his Notes on America for general circulation. So long a time, however, has now elapsed since Capt. Marryatt gave his Diary on America to the world, that all animosity and ill-feeling, occasioned by that work, should be now laid aside, and its offences should no longer be charged upon his other productions. Let the Diary be responsible for its own sins; tho' it might itself be now perused with amusement, and not wholly without profit, as a racy caricature, having much more humor than truth-the latter being, on all possible occasions, sacrificed to make way for the introduction of the former. At any rate it would now be discreditable as well as improper, to allow any ill feeling, excited by the Diary in Amerca, to interfere with our appreciation or enjoyment of Capt. Marryatt's Novels.

Under these circumstances, we are glad to have an opportunity of bringing the Captain again before the public, and claiming for him so much of praise and popularity as he really deserves. We only regret, for his sake, that his new novel, which furnishes us this opportunity, is so much inferior to all its predecessors; for however favorably we may be disposed towards the author and his book, we cannot conscientiously deny, that this is the worst of the race. Percival Keene is, indeed,

little more than a loose farrago of shreds and patches, culled or imitated from the former productions of the same author.

At no time, indeed, could Capt. Marryatt have laid claim to the higher qualities of the novelist; he never had any thing of the artist in his composition, and seems neither to have known the importance of that in which he was deficient, nor to have been desirous of supplying the deficiency. His mode of writing, as we learn from himself, is to place a sheet of paper before him, and to trust to Providence for his ideas, and the order in which they appear; not, as Sterne says of himself, jumping forward, and by that means intercepting many which God, in his goodness intended for other folks, but laying hold as he stumbles over them, and jolting them down in the same order. Capt. Marryatt informs us, in his Newton Foster, that as he writes his novels, he is wholly ignorant what the next chapter may bring forth; in fact that he arranges his plot and moulds his characters, between his pen and his paper, singularly regardless of what has gone before or what ought to come after. Hence, in the details, there are sometimes the most ludicrous mistakes, names changed unconsciously—it is not that Sancho has his ass stolen from him and yet is found riding very complacently on his back, but Sancho himself frequently loses his name with Capt. Marryatt, and even his identity. From this same cause also it arises, that his characters sometimes say on one page what they unsay on the next, and grow several years older, by numerical computation, in the course of a few months. Were we so disposed, we might cite several instances of such inconsistence, from the present novel, in which they are not less frequent than in its more meritorious predecessors.

As for any deliberate purpose or moral aim proposed by Capt. Marryat! in his writings, we should do very great injustice to him were we to accuse him of it; so far is he from attaining it, if he ever dreamt of setting it before him. Incidentally, he does touch at times upon moral and political questions, but ethics and politics appear both equally alien to his genius. His suggestions in regard to naval reform must have been valuable, for they have been, to some extent, acted on by the Admiralty, but here he was in his own element, and there is otherwise every reason to believe the Captain to be a good and skilful officer. There is, however, running through all his novels, what is much better than oft-repeated precepts and windy preaching, a vein of good practical common sense. As for what boarding school misses and hobble-dehoys in love denominate sentiment and romance, there is none of it. Indeed we do not know a more speedy cure for tawdry second-hand sentimentalism, than these same novels of Capt. Marryatt's.

Of course, writing by fits and starts, as he does, and taking the ideas as they chance to rise to the surface, drifting along at the mercy of circumstances, without keeping his head steady to any point of the

compass, his work cannot pretend to any regularity of plot: his story if it be not undue courtesy so to name the scanty threads on which he strings his anecdotes and humor, is barely sufficient to keep his three volumes together, and would be equally suitable and serviceable for one or thirteen. Like the interminable rhapsody of Sir Charles Grandison, it is capable, from its extreme ductility and tenuity, of any conceivable degree of extension.

We are willing to admit Bulwer's distinctions, between the dramatic and the narrative forms of the novel, and to concede that but little plot is requisite in those of Capt. Marryatt. We might even do so in his justification, if it were not that terms of art and philosophical distinctions would be as inappropriately applied to his novels, as to Gammer Goose's Nursery Tales.

There is nothing, then, in Capt. Marryatt's writings to induce us to take them up with any expectation of that high and refined gratification, which springs from the attentive study of a finished work of art. And it is no less true, that if we take them up with any such expectation, we will never be able to appreciate them at their real worth, and may be disposed to throw them aside in disgust. But there is a rich fund in store for us, if we turn them over with careless hand, giving ourselves freely up to the genius of the hour, and content to be borne about whithersoever the whims of the author may hurry us. If we are willing to resign ourselves placidly to our fate, we are certain to be richly repaid by the greatest equberance of broad grins and racy humor. However inferior Marryatt may be to Smollett, in the other qualifications of a novelist, we have not the slightest hesitation in placing him, in this respect, before the author of Tom Jones. Other humorists-Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais, Butler, Swift, Voltaire, &c.-have usually made their wit and humor subservient to ulterior and more recondite aims. It is not so with Marryatt. In him it invariably appears the bubbling forth and boiling over of a heart full of the most extravagant fun. (We use this word advisedly, though hardly recognized by modern writers inter verba elegantiora.) With Marryatt's Novels in our hand, we can sit for successive hours and laugh almost incessantly; and it is a matter of no moment whether the jest be new, or frequent perusal has made it familiar to us.

There are, indeed, some Morosophists, who may affect to consider what we have here mentioned as Marryatt's greatest recommendation, to be, instead, sentence of condemnation in itself. These men look upon laughter as a sin, and think that long faces and grave looks may pass current in this world for virtue as well as wisdom. It might abate their arrogance in some measure did they know that the wittiest men have usually been the wisest, and that there is often more sterling sense enveloped in a joke, at which they might turn up their noses, than in all the preaching and twaddle they could dole out in a fortnight,

and they are not sparing of their "line upon line and precept upon precept."

And now let us turn to Percival Keene-the work immediately under consideration-we have delayed perhaps too long already, in playing round our text. The story of this novel is the same canvass on which Capt. Marryatt has drawn his other fictions-Mother-Father-Birth-Education--Fighting-and Matrimony. These elements are blended together in very nearly the same proportions as of old, though they are slightly modified. Thus if the Celeste of Peter Simple re-appears under the figure of Minnie Vanderwelt, the hero does not see his future bride till the second volume, when she is seven years old, and visible only for a few minutes. He sees her again when she is ten, and is in the same house with her for three weeks. Five years after she is recalled to his mind by old Mr. Fraser at Curaçoa, and described as the pretty Minnie. From that period love begins, and daily increases, as "memory grows fat by what it feeds upon," and when he meets Minnie in Hamburg, for the third time, there is little requisite except to appoint the day on which the marriage ceremony shall take place. So much for the love scrape in Percival Keene-nothing but mesmeric influences will account for the mutual affection.

The story is this-a pretty young woman, Miss Arabella Mason, living at Madeline Hall, as humble companion to the Honorable Miss Delmar, is thrown very much into the company of that lady's nephew. The intimacy increases until it becomes more pleasant than proper for Miss Arabella, as her son is born three weeks after Ben Keene, the servant of the said nephew, had married her, agreeably to his master's orders. The nature of the connexion between Capt. Delmar and Miss Arabella may be inferred from the lady's declaration to her son in after years; "so if it had not been for him, child, you would never have been born." Ben is shipped off to India before long, having shown himself a most obedient servant, to his wife, where he meets with the fate of Uriah, though his Bathsheba had offended before matrimony. Young Percival Keene, so named after his real father, is sent to school when six years old-the account of his school boy tricks is the most amusing part of these volumes, and as such we shall return to it. Capt. Delmar takes the boy to sea with him when he is in his fourteenth year, and by a cold, haughty and studied manner conceals the interest he feels in him. The remaining history of the hero is the record of his continued efforts to render himself worthy of his father, and, by so doing, to induce Capt. Delmar to acknowledge him publicly as his son. Capt. Delmar becomes Lord De Versely, and dies, without doing it, of a most appropriate disease-ossification of the heart. He has, however, informed his aunt, Miss Delmar, of the truth, and induced her to alter her will, which had been drawn

in his own favor, and leave Madeline Hall and the "twelve thousand acres in a ring fence" to Percival Keene, who is also required to change his name to that of Delmar.

There are not a few instances in these volumes of bad judgment, but this change of name we should consider the worst of all, if we could be brought to suppose that Capt. Marryatt ever dreamt of any moral to his tale. Young Keene attains a high and honorable position in society, by his courage, his talents, and his unblemished character. He attains, under the name of Keene, to all that that of Delmar could give him, and to much more than he could have derived from it without the possession of his own virtees. And when he stands at the topmost round of the ladder, having reached the eminence by his own exertions; when the drop curtain is ready to fall, and veil him from our view, he is authorized to bear the name of Delmar by a postcript in a letter, and the last sentence in the work, as if that was to increase our interest, or to add to our sympathy for the hero of the tale. In our estimation it lowers rather than elevates the man. If this be defended on the ground of poetical justice, as the reward of a career of continual endeavors towards this aim, we laugh at such a manifestation of it, and think that, at any rate, it should have come before Percival and his readers had both ceased to expect it.

Criticism, according to the rules of art, is not our present purpose, with Percival Keene before us for consideration; and, accordingly, these few remarks must be regarded as a digression and pardoned as such. Rather, however, than proceed in this strain, let us revert to the schooling and education of our hero, which, as we have mentioned above, is the most interesting part of the novel. Marryatt is perfectly at home in all the diablerie of a school-boy-his tricks, his pranks, his vagaries, do not task his inventive powers as an author; reminiscences of the past seem to be all that is required for the completion of his task. We could almost venture to wager, that the Captain himself, as a school-boy, was full of tricks and mischief; there is so much verve thrown into all the anecdotes of his heroes at school, that we are often led to suppose that the Captain draws much more largely on his memory than his imagination, and describes, indeed, only his own adventures. Happy as he may have been in former efforts, this part of Percival Keene certainly surpasses any similar attempt before, and for that reason we have selected the greater part of it for present citation. The immediate cause of Percival's being sent to school was a violent attack, which he made with his teeth, one evening, on the most tender and sensitive part of his grand-mother. He had nearly blown up the old lady, by inducing her to empty into the fire her snuff-box, which he had taken care should have more gunpowder than snuff in it. His "granny" starting back in alarm, with her face begrimed and her eyelashes singed off, fell back on the