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Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III. Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance. St. Alban's Abbey, a Metrical Tale; with some Poetical Pieces. By ANNE RADCLIFFE, Author of "The Mysteries of Udolpho,' "Romance of the Forest," &c. To which is prefixed, a Memoir of the Author, with Extracts from her Journals. Four Volumes in Two. Philadelphia. Carey & Lea. 1826. 12mo.

WE should have been glad of a better life of Mrs. Radcliffe than the one before us. It contains but little more than is to be found in the extract in Scott's "Lives of the Novelists." Let us, however, be grateful for that little, and, in particular, for the correction of the silly stories set a-going by some small theorists, who thought to account for the operations of a mind, which they should have been content to look up at in silent wonder.

Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy; and it now seems that all the mountain scenery of "The Mysteries of Udolpho" was laid open to the public gaze before ever she visited the Rhine, or even made the tour of the English lakes. This is fortunate for the Edinburgh Reviewers; for, as their old theory has come to naught, they have now an opportunity to build up another. Scott, though he fell into the Rhine, has not stumbled on the mountains of Italy, and remarks; "The inaccuracy of the reviewer is of no great consequence; but a more absurd report found its way into print, that Mrs Radcliffe, having visited the fine old Gothic mansion of Haddon House, had insisted upon remaining a night there, in the course of which she had been inspired with all that enthusiasm for Gothic residences, hidden passages, and mouldering

walls, which mark her writings. Mrs. Radcliffe, we are assured, never saw Haddon House; and, although it was a place excellently worth her attention, and could hardly have been seen by her without suggesting some of those ideas in which her imagination naturally revelled, yet we should suppose the mechanical aid to invention the recipe for fine writing-the sleeping in a dismantled and unfurnished old house, was likely to be rewarded with nothing but a cold, and was an affectation of enthusiasm, to which Mrs. Radcliffe would have disdained to have recourse."

We should be glad to know where that author slept, who, in imagination, raised the grand and terrific castle in "The Romance of the Pyrenees." Probably in some snug bed-chamber in Manchester or Litchfield. Martin, who paints mountains with more grandeur and truth than any living artist, say his brothers in the art, was of humble origin, bred to a trade, with scarcely a common school education, and, above all, was never out of England in his life. This is a more striking instance than Mrs. Radcliffe; for, says Scott of her descriptions (and we are pleased to have such support for our opinions), they "were marked in a particular degree (to our thinking at least) with the characteristics of fancy-portraits; yet many of her contemporaries conceived them to be exact descriptions of scenes which she had visited in person." "There is a sympathy, no doubt, between the material and intellectual world, a fitness in the one for the other. There are powers in some minds, sleeping their first, infant sleep; let but a certain chord be touched in nature, and to what sweet and universal harmony do they wake! what sounds do they pour forth in unison! They need no musician to instruct them-the teacher is within! Look into your Locke, or your Stewart, and explain it if you can. You will come away none the wiser for your search, though you may come away fancying yourself possessed of all knowledge.

People were not content with making Mrs. Radcliffe lie awake all night in a chilly, damp, old house, in order to build castles in the air; but they must needs drive her mad with ghosts of her own raising; though she herself protests to us, after the manner of Snug, the joiner, that they are no true ghosts, but that one is a smuggler, another an unfortunate lady, and a third a piece of wax-work. No one, who has raised a sprite, was ever frightened out of his senses at the sight of it. We have never heard of Monk Lewis's going mad, or of Maturin's dying out of his wits. Either of them would have been more overcome at the terrors of the other's conjuring up, than at any of his own raising. Writing

is too serious a business; there is no leisure time to be frightened in; there are too many powers hard at work to allow of any thing more than just enough of that excitement which is necessary to keep them in motion. If you wish an author to feel his own production with the same kind of intensity that another does, you must let him forget it for a time, and then be his own reader. "The evening was always her favorite season for composition," says the biographer of Mrs. Radcliffe, "when her spirits were in their happiest tone, and she was most secure from interruption. So far was she from being subjected to her own terrors, that she often laughingly presented to Mr. Radcliffe chapters which he could not read alone without shuddering." Not that she laughed while actually writing, or that the word, happiest, is intended to be used in its more ordinary sense.

We are not at all surprised at Mrs. Radcliffe's not going mad to oblige the world; but we cannot so well account for her doing so little to oblige it in a more agreeable way after writing "The Italian "the best of her works. Having produced all her prose works, except the one before us, in the course of seven years, and before she was thirty-four,-an age at which few authors can be said to have reached their prime, she seems to have sat down for the remainder of her life satisfied with the quiet occupations and enjoyments of domestic life, and with now and then amusing herself with writing verses, or entering on her journal descriptions of the scenery she passed through in the summer excursions with her husband, of which she was so fond. Up to the close of "The Italian," her mind seems gradually to have ascended; and perhaps she felt as if the next step might be downward. It may be that she was right. "Gaston de Blondeville," not given to the world till after her death, and written scarcely five years after "The Italian,”—though showing a surprising improvement in style, discovers, at the same time, a subsiding of those energies by which she had held us with such dreadful mastery. Besides, it sometimes happens, even with minds of great genius, that the exciting cause ceasing with the completing of a work, and exhaustion following intense action; a despondency comes over the spirits, and, instead of taking hope from the past to go on with, they are ready to stop and sit down with despair. It is true, that this state rarely lasts long, and that the mind commonly gathers strength and life again. But there may be some of a more delicate frame, who never entirely free themselves of the misgiving; and this mistrust weakening the elasticity of their powers, brings upon them the very feebleness

they feared. It is not that critics by profession may praise a second work less heartily than they did a first, or that the crowd of second-hand talking critics and readers may declare themselves sorry at your failure, and yet take more pleasure in it than in your success, it is not this, though this may mingle with it,—it is the dread of falling short of that excellence which the mind imagines to itself, to which it looks up with tremulous delight, and longs after with all the cravings of the full, yet hungry soul. Genius is, perhaps, not more distinctly marked out from mere talents by its originating powers, than by its intense delight in, and longing after, this grand and beautiful intellectual excellence, and its love of it for itself alone. He only who has had this glorious vision, and had his soul moved by it, as the man of genius alone can be moved, he only can know how disheartening is the fear that he may be forced to say to himself,-I have failed! Whether any thing like this had its effect upon the delicate mind of Mrs. Radcliffe, is mere conjecture now. Perhaps there is something in the nature of the thoughts and passions with which, and upon which, she wrought, that exhausts itself. The terrific, in real life, is apt in time to produce indifference or stupor, and, in our fictitious being, is likely, it may be, to settle away into a gentle and quieting calm. The sublime, too, besides its tenseness, may want the relief of variety in its character, to enable us to be so frequently or so long affected by it, as by other emotions of the soul; and we know that the mind which has been some time forced by it above its ordinary condition, becomes wearied, and is glad to loosen its hold. We are but feeble creatures here; and there are thoughts and feelings which sometimes stir themselves within us, which are too mighty for us now. If we are wise, we shall not try to strangle them in our souls, but reverently think of them as prophetic of that expanded and grander state of being which our spirits are ordained to.

Perhaps, after all, an aversion to being talked about,—which seemed a striking part of this female's character; an accidental suspension of her labors breaking up the habit of application and exertion; a full relish for the snugness and quiet of home; the pleasure she took in her summer excursions with her husband, and the thousand little occupations and scarcely observed pleasures of daily life, which so satisfy simple minds and kind hearts; and, more than these, that most absorbing of all human enjoyments, the luxurious dreaming of a creative intellect, may have done more towards checking her after exertions, than all that is contained in our notion upon the effects of the sublime and terrific.