with the promise of deliverance and immunity, on condition of their exchanging situations with me...... No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer.'

In one of Mr. Maturin's Sermons, there is the following passage.

At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his wordis there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation ?-No, there is not one-not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!'

This observation supplied Mr. M. with the hint of his tale, and at first led us to suppose that his hero was a fiend despatched like Belphegor to earth, though on a different errand. The passage, however, which we have previously quoted, affords the true key to his character, although Melmoth is made to express himself hypothetically. Hence, amid all the demoniacal fierceness and malignity of his character, there are occasional, though brief relentings, faint touches of human feeling, transient flashes of something like communion with his species, which in some small degree mitigate the terrors of this awful being, who moves restlessly and rapidly through the world for his allotted term of one hundred and fifty years; anxiously but vainly seeking, among the most dreadful scenes of misery, some wretch who would consent, for present rescue and unbounded means of enjoyment, to barter his hopes of salvation, and thus relieve Melmoth from the penalty of his bond, by accepting as his substitute, his power and his despair. His adventures are described in a series of tales, which are introduced with considerable skill in such a way as to increase the general interest. The descriptions of the awful and agonizing visitations among which he is continually moving, and of which he makes every effort to take advantage, are worked up with tremendous truth and force, though sometimes with a minute accuracy which defeats its object by exciting disgust rather than terror, and reminds us of the Newgate Calendar, or the adventures of Jean Baptiste Couteau, rather than of the terribil via of the painters of Schedeni and Frankenstein.

The Wanderer first drew breath in an Irish castle, anno 1616; and the living agents of the romance, including himself, are introduced to us in 1816, on the same spot; where his portentous re-appearance has the effect of frightening to death his lineal descendant, a rich miser whose dying exhibitions of the master passion are portrayed with great strength. The heir, a young man of much mental energy, discovers a picture by which he afterwards recognizes the Wanderer,' whose form

and aspect were only remarkable from the strange and portentous lustre which flashed from his eyes. The younger Melmoth is directed by his uncle's will to a mysterious and mutilated manuscript, which with much difficulty he decyphers, and finds it to contain the adventures of Stanton, an Englishman who, about the year, 1676 visited Spain in the course of his European travels. From this tale, we cannot avoid transferring to our pages the following magnificent description.

On the night of the 17th of August, 1677, he found himself in the plains of Valencia, deserted by a cowardly guide, who had been terrified by the sight of a cross erected as a memorial of a murder, had slipped off his mule unperceived, crossing himself every step he took on his retreat from the heretic, and left Stanton amid the terrors of an approaching storm, and the dangers of an unknown country. The sublime and yet softened beauty of the scenery around, had filled the soul of Stanton with delight, and he enjoyed that delight as Englishmen generally do, silently. The magnificent remains of two dynasties that had passed away, the ruins of Roman palaces, and of Moorish fortresses, were around and above him; the dark and heavy thunder-clouds that advanced slowly, seemed like the shrouds of these spectres of departed greatness; they approached, but yet they did not overwhelm or conceal them, as if nature herself was for once awed by the power of man; and far below, the lovely valley of Valencia blushed and burned in all the glory of

sunset.

Stanton gazed around. The dif ference between the architecture of the Roman and Moorish ruins struck him. Among the former are the remains of a theatre, and something like a public place; the latter present only the remains of fortresses, embattled, castellated, and fortified from top to bottom-not a loop-hole for pleasure to get in by-the loop-holes were only for arrows; all denoted military power and despotic subjugation a l'outrance. The contrast might have pleased a philosopher, and he might have indulged in the reflection, that though the ancient Greeks and Romans were savages, (as Dr. Johnson says all people who want a press must be, and he says truly,) yet they were wonderful savages for their time, for they alone have left traces of their taste for pleasure in the countries they conquered, in their superb theatres, temples, (which were also dedicated to pleasure one way or another,) and baths," while other conquering bands of savages never left any thing behind them but traces of their rage for power. So thought Stanton, as he still saw strongly defined, though darkened by the darkening clouds, the huge skeleton of a Roman amphitheatre, its arched and gigantic colonnades now admitting a gleam of light, and now commingling with the purple

• It occurs here, rather unfortunately for Mr. M.'s hypothesis, that the Moors have left traces' of this sort quite as decided as the Romans : their mosques, their palaces, their gardens, are all exquisite of their kind.

thunder-cloud; and......the solid and heavy mass of a Moorish fortress, no light playing between its impermeable walls-the image of power, dark, isolated, impenetrable. Stanton forgot his cowardly guide, his loneliness, his danger amid an approaching storm and an inhospitable country......all this was forgot in contemplating the glorious and awful scenery before him-light struggling with darkness-and darkness menacing a light still more terrible, and announcing its menace in the blue and livid mass of cloud that hovered like a destroying angel in the air, its arrows aimed, but their direction awfully indefinite. But he ceased to forget these local and petty dangers, as the sublimity of romance would term them, when he saw the first flash of lightning, broad and red as the banners of an insulting army whose motto is Væ victis, shatter to atoms the remains of a Roman tower; the rifted stones rolled down the hill, and fell at the feet of Stanton........He stood and saw another flash dart its bright, brief, and malignant glance over the ruins of ancient power, and the luxuriance of recent fertility.'

Amid this awful scene, the Wanderer first presented himself to Stanton: as a number of peasants slowly passed along, bearing the bodies of two persons who had been struck by the lightning, he was startled by the loud, wild, and protracted' laugh of that mysterious being. By the circumstances of this meeting, and by subsequent occurrences, the mind of Stanton was inflamed to an insane excess of curiosity, increased by a glimpse and momentary converse in London, until a mercenary relation, taking advantage of his eccentricities, confined him in a private mad-house. Here, while driven to the very verge of madness by the cries and yells which incessantly harassed him, and by his own sufferings and despondency, Melmoth appeared before him; the melodious smoothness of his voice,' contrasting frightfully with the stony rigour of his features, and the fiend-like brilliancy of his eyes.' The tempter offered liberation and felicity, but at a dreadful price :-he was repelled with horror, but the impression was never effaced; and when Stanton afterwards procured his liberty, he set forth, with morbid restlessness, to pursue his strange visitant. His quest was unsuccessful, but in the course of his inquiries, having ascertained the Wanderer's Irish origin, he visited Ireland, and left at the castle, the manuscript which was now costing the younger Melmoth so much pains to decypher. A tremendous storm and signals of shipwreck having called the latter to the shore, he there sees his terrific ancestor standing on a crag, unruffled even in the skirts of his clothing by the raging tempest. In an attempt to scale the rock, young Melmoth falls into the sea, and is only rescued from death by a Spaniard swimming from the wreck, the sole survivor of its crew. This brings on the story of Monçada, with a long series of monastic sufferings and persecutions, terminating in the dungeons of the Inquisition,

and the vain attempt of the Wanderer standing by him in the cell, to persuade him to give up his final hope. The following passage from Monçada's dream on the eve of his condemnation, is one of those horrible realizations of torture which Mr. M. is rather too fond of employing instead of less violent methods of producing impression.

I saw the stage before me-I was chained to the chair, amid the ringing of bells, the preaching of the Jesuits, and the shouts of the multitude. A splendid amphitheatre stood opposite,-the king and queen of Spain, and all the nobility and hierarchy of the land, were there to sce us burn...... the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;- my feet were scorched to a cinder,-my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,— the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze; it ascended, caught my hair,-I was crowned with fire, my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets ;-I opened my mouth, it drank fire,-I closed it, the fire was within,-and still the bells rung on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and all the nobility and priesthood, looked on, and we burned and burned.'

He awoke, and the Wanderer was by him to tempt him with the hope of liberty. It came, however, in a less destructive shape: the buildings of the Inquisition caught fire, and the condemned captive found an opportunity of escaping. This scene is powerfully described, and the figure of Melmoth, standing on the spire of a neighbouring church to contemplate its horrors, with the various groupes of guards, prisoners, and Inquisitors, is well sketched and shadowed. Monçada found refuge in the vault of the Jew Adonijab, who sets him to read a manuscript which contained the story of a young and interesting female, born of Spanish parents, left alone in childhood on an island in the Indian ocean, found there by Melmoth, and singled out by him as his victim. In this part, there is much that is merely fantastic; but in the scene where he is represented as shewing her the emblems of the different religions of the earth, he has fallen into a Lady Morgan-like blunder. Where did he learn that Mahadeva is a goddess?" If Mr. Maturin will take a journey to mount Cailasa, he will find, at least if he trust the Hindoos, Mahadeva enthroned there in all the honours of masculine divinity; and though he has thought proper to represent her as possessed of little power, he will, on further inquiry, find that he is no less a being than Seeva, one of the three principal deities of Hindoostan. The beauty and innocence of Immalee, the young Indian, and her fond attachment to him, touch the heart of the Wanderer;' he leaves her, but meets her again when restored to her family, and under the name of Isidora still cherishing the remembrance of her former state. After many

scenes of horror and death, a clandestine marriage takes place, and Isidora finally dies in the cells of the Inquisition, refusing Melmoth's offers of liberation at the expense of the hope of eternity. The fate of Isidora gave a stronger pang to the heart of her seducer, than any he had felt before. He had struggled to save her from his own fatal influence; he had, in his own phrase, stood between her and himself; but the die was cast, and his victim perished. In the course of this tale, two others are incidentally related: the first contains the history of Walberg, and paints the agonies of a starving family in the colours of a Spagnoletto. Even here, however, the tempter fails; though Walberg is kept from giving way only by the influence of his admirable wife. The second is the pathetic story of Elinor, whose life is occupied in a withering attendance on the steps of her lover, struck to idiotcy by calamitous events, but who resists to the last the Wanderer's conditional offers of restoring sanity to the object of her unalterable affection. Melmoth at length attains the stipulated period, returns to the castle of his ancestors, and after a night of shrieks and fearful sounds, disappears.

Such is the frame-work of Mr. Maturin's inventions, and such the foundation on which he has rested a strange and fantastic fabric, which, amid much extravagance, exhibits the incontestible signs of genius and power. We shall insert one extract more, with the preliminary remark, that we were not aware of its existence when we wrote the opening paragraphs of this article.

'I cannot,' says Mr. Maturin in his preface, again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to any other, but-am I allowed the choice?'

We can only say that, while we deeply regret the necessity here intimated, we think that there are better and even more profitable subjects on which a mind like Mr. Maturin's might be employed. We should hope that the sale of his sermons might be such as to induce him to hold on in that way; but we would, with the most friendly dispositions, caution him against staining his pages with the effusions of sectarian prejudice. They do the Puritans' no injury, certainly; but they cannot raise their Author in the estimation of moderate men on either side.