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published in 1784, in French, being one of the rare instances of an Englishman being able to write that difficult language with the grace and purity of a native. Being afterwards translated by the author into his mother tongue, it forms one of the most extraordinary monuments of splendid imagery and caustic wit which literature can afford. It is very short, and in some respects resembles (at least in its cold sarcasm of tone and exquisite refinement of style) the Zadig of Voltaire. But Vathek is immeasurably superior in point of imagination, and in its singular fidelity to the Oriental coloring and costume. Indeed, if we set aside its contemptuous and sneering tone, it might pass for a translation of one of The Thousand and One Nights. It narrates the adventures of a haughty and effeminate monarch, led on by the temptations of a malignant genie and the sophistries of a cruel and ambitious mother, to commit all sorts of crimes, to abjure his faith, and to offer allegiance to Eblis, the Mahometan Satan, in the hope of seating himself on the throne of the Preadamite sultans. * The gradual development in his mind of sensuality, cruelty, atheism, and insane and Titanic ambition, is very finely traced: the imagery throughout is truly splendid, its Eastern gorgeousness tempered and relieved by the sneering, sarcastic irony of a French Encyclopédiste; and the concluding scene soars into the highest atmosphere of grand descriptive poetry. Here he descends into the subterranean palace of Eblis, where he does homage to the Evil One, and wanders for a while among the superhuman splendors of those regions of punishment. The fancy of genius has seldom conceived anything more terrible than "the vast multitude, incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their heart, without once regarding anything around them. They all avoided each other, and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random, unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert where no foot had trodden."

Hope, like Beckford, was a man of refined taste, luxurious habits, and possessed of a colossal fortune accumulated in commerce. His work, though very different in form from that of Beckford, was not unlike it in some points. Anastasius, published in 1819, purports to be the autobiography of a Greek, who, to escape the consequences of his own crimes and villanies of every kind, becomes a renegade, and passes through a long series of the most extraordinary and romantic vicissitudes. The hero is a compound of almost all the vices of his unfortunate and degraded nation; and in his vicissitudes of fortune we see passing before us, as in a diorama, the whole social, political, and religious life of Turkey and the Morea. The style is elaborate and passionate: and this, as well as the character of the principal personage,

"Linked 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 coloring 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. 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 gayety 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.

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§ 16. IV. NAVAL AND MILITARY NOVELS. - It now remains only to speak of one species of prose fiction that which has for its subject the manners and personages of marine or military life. It may 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 endeavored 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 favorite 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.

At the head of our marine novelists stands CAPTAIN MARRYAT (1792– 1848), 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 sat 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 labor, and without hesitation. He seems half tipsy with the very gayety 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 Eugene Sue.

The tales called Tom Cringle's Log and The Cruise of the Midge are also works in this kind (although not exclusively naval) of striking brilliancy and imaginative power. In these we have a most gorgeously colored 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 splendor of language. They were the production of MR. MICHAEL SCOTT (d. 1835), 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 cause them to be ascribed to the pen of some of the most distinguished of living writers, particularly to that of PROFESSOR WILSON.

The military novels are mostly by living authors, and are therefore excluded from our work. 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.

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of the times of Trajan; Adam Blair (1822), Reginald Dalton (1823), and Matthew Wald (1824). JAMES BAILLIE FRASER (d. 1856), the author of

A few other Novelists, omitted in the preceding two Oriental romances, The Kuzzilbash, a Tale of chapter, deserve a few words:

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HENRY MACKENZIE (1745-1831), a Scotchman and a resident in Edinburgh, where he enjoyed great literary celebrity. He is best known by The Man of Feeling, published in 1771, in which he imitated with considerable success the style of Sterne. He also wrote The Man of the World, which is inferior to the former novel.

THOMAS HOLCROFT (1745-1809), an ardent admirer of the French revolutionary doctrines, which he introduced into his novel, Anna St. Ives, published in 1792. He is better known by his comedy, The Road to Ruin.

SOPHIA LEE (1750-1824) and HARRIET LEE (1766-1851), the authoresses of the Canterbury Tales, of which the greater part was written by the younger sister. The first volume appeared in 1797. These Tales are of real merit, and will well repay perusal. "Kruitzner, or the German's Tale," says Lord Byron, "made a deep impression upon me, and may indeed be said to contain the germ of much that I have since written." He produced in 1821 a dramatic version of this tale, under the title of Werner, or the Inheritance.

DR. JOHN MOORE (1729-1802), a native of Stirling, and a medical man, wrote numerous works, of which his novel called Zeluco, published in 1785, is the best known. Dr. Moore had lived abroad for some years, and the scene of the novel is laid chiefly in Italy.

ANNA MARIA PORTER (1781-1832) and JANE PORTER (1776-1850), two sisters whose works were very popular in their day. The Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and the Scottish Chiefs (1809) of the latter are the best known. The style is animated, and some of the scenes striking; but they exhibit little knowledge of real life or character.

MRS. MARY BRUNTON (1778-1818), a native of the Orkneys, and the authoress of Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814), two novels of considerable power.

MRS. ELIZABETH HAMILTON (1758-1816), a native of Belfast, but brought up in Scotland, the authoress of the popular moral tale, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, published in 1808.

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART (1794-1854), who will claim a fuller notice in the following chapter, must be mentioned here on account of his four remarkable novels: Valerius, a Roman Story (1821), a tale

Khorasan (1828), and The Persian Adventurer, of the same character as Mr. Morier's novels. CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1824-1855), better known by her pseudonyme CURRER BELL, the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman, published in 1847 a novel, entitled Jane Eyre. This was followed by Shirley in 1849, and Villette in 1853. These novels are remarkable works, exhibiting great knowledge of human nature and striking power.

ALBERT SMITH (1816-1860), a native of Chertsey, was educated for the medical profession, which he abandoned for literature. His Adventures of Mr. Ledbury, Christopher Tadpole, The Poppleton Legacy, and smaller works, are amusing, and have had an extensive circulation.

DOUGLAS JERROLD (1803-1757) was a native of London, but spent his carly life at Sheerness, where his father was manager of the theatre. His education was scanty. He went to sea at an early age, sailing with Captain Austen, as a midshipman. When peace came he left the navy, and was apprenticed to a printer. It was at this time that his first literary production appeared — a criticism upon the opera "Der Freischutz." This was followed by a number of dramatic pieces, among which BlackEyed Susan was the most celebrated. He now became a most industrious writer of plays. Rent Day was his crowning success, performed at the leading theatres, and obtaining the kindly notice of the artist Wilkie, from whose picture it had been elaborated. This was followed by The Prisoner of War, Time works Wonders, The Heart of Gold.

Contemporaneously with these dramatic writings, his prose works were claiming the ear of the public. A Man made of Money, The Chronicles of Clovernook, St. Giles's and St. James's, were contributed to different magazines of the day. Punch found him one of its most successful supporters. In this paper appeared his Story of a Father, Punch's Letters to his Son, and the Caudle Lectures.

He took a leading part also in political writings. He contributed to the Ballot and the Examiner, started the weekly newspaper called after his own name, and at last undertook the editorship of the popular and largely circulated Lloyd's Newspaper. Douglas Jerrold was best known in the social circle. His wit and repartee, his trenchant and mirthful sayings, are still remembered and repeated. He died on the 8th of June, 1857.

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