expect, any return. Their manners were at once gentle and ceremoniously respectful; they uncovered their heads in presence of the English, and bowed whenever they spoke. The shore was soon covered with spectators; and the ships were visited by several chiefs, who behaved in the frankest and kindest manner. When, however, the English began to make overtures for returning these visits on shore, every mode of polite evasion was studiously employed. They pretended to consider themselves so much inferior to their new acquaintances, as to have no claim to such a return, which would even, they said, have degraded the latter. Captain Maxwell having complained of illness, they offered to send a physician on board; and when he said that his physician had recommended a ride on shore, they merely laughed, and changed the subject. After several visits, however, the Captain pushed the offer so home, that they could not reject it without an open breach. Five of the officers, accordingly, landed, and were received with much ceremony, being led by the chiefs through two files of people, ranged on each side for the purpose of viewing them. They soon reached a temple, where they found a large japanned table spread, and were regaled with a dinner, consisting of hard boiled eggs, fish fried in butter, smoked pork, pigs' liver sliced, several kind of cakes, and other dishes, most of which were found palatable. The entertainment was conducted with much gaiety and good humour. It was still in vain that they solicited permission to land their stores, and to take up their quarters on shore, for the benefit of health and exercise. This, however, was at length brought about. The natives had, at first, recommended a harbour ten miles to the southward; but their new visitors, when better known, be coming daily more agreeable, they shewed no wish to part, and always shunned furnishing the promised guide to this new station. One morning, however, the Lyra disappeared, and they found, on inquiry, that it had gone to reconnoitre the harbour in question. The dread of losing the English altogether made all their demands be at once agreed to. They were received on shore, and commodiously lodged in a large temple,

Their range, however, was always confined within the narrowest possible limits. They saw at a distance a large building, which they had reason to believe was the king's palace; but all positive information on the subject was steadily withheld. At the same time, the intimacy and cordiality of the English with the natives daily augmented. They had a Chinese interpreter, so that they could communicate from the first by words; and both parties soon made great progress in each other's language. The most interesting personage was a young man of the name of Madera, who appeared first as a common native, and associated with the sailors, but gradually rose in consequence, till he proved to be a man of very high rank, who had assumed this disguise for the sake of observing the strangers more intimately. He appears to have been remarkably distinguished by intelligence, as well as by a good-humoured, gay, and friendly disposition. Before leaving Loo Choo, they were visited by a prince of the blood, a very polite personage, but who had nothing striking in his manners or appearance. On their expressing a wish to be introduced to the king, he stated, that the custom of the country forbade this, unless they came on an express mission from their own sovereign. The English soon after took their departure, which drew forth deep demonstrations of grief from Madera and their other friends.

The inhabitants of Loo Choo appear, indeed, to be a very interesting people. In their manners and political state, they seem to hold a middle place between the people of China and those of the South Sea Islands, and, by a rare good fortune, to have united the good qualities of both, without the faults of either. They combine the civilization of the one race with the simplicity of the other. There was every reason to believe that they were unacquainted both with arms and with money. Their honesty was quite unimpeachable. Although they had free access to every part of the ship, and of the temple in which the stores were afterwards placed, no instance of pilfering was ever observed; and, when any thing was missing, no one ever suspected that it could have been carried off by the natives. They are a gay and social people, carry

about their dinner in boxes, and have frequent pic-nic parties among themselves. They appeared to enjoy much the hospitality of the ship, and did not always confine themselves within the most rigid rules of temperance. The population could not be conjectured. The part of the island immediately under observation was highly fertile and cultivated, but the opposite side was understood to be much less improved.

Captain Hall displays a degree of geological knowledge, which, though hereditary with him, is very unusual in maritime travellers. Unfortunate ly, the regions surveyed afforded little scope for its exercise. We must except the curious account of the structure of an island off the coast of Corea, which he named Hutton's Island, after that celebrated geologist. We may add the descriptions of the coral formations on the coast of Loo Choo, for that island presented no other remarkable features. The volume is, moreover, enriched by a vocabulary of the Loo Choo language, and by a great variety of nautical observations.

Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. 8 Vols. Svo. London. Lackington, &c. 1818.

HERE is one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of caricature and exaggeration. It is formed on the Godwinian manner, and has all the faults, but many like wise of the beauties of that model. In dark and gloomy views of nature and of man, bordering too closely on impiety, in the most outrageous improbability, in sacrificing every thing to effect, it even goes beyond its great prototype; but in return, it possesses a similar power of fascination, something of the same mastery in harsh and savage delineations of passion, relieved in like manner by the gentler features of domestic and simple feelings. There never was a wilder story imagined, yet, like most of the fictions of this age, it has an air of reality attached to it, by being connected with the favourite projects and passions of the times. The real events of the world have, in our day, too, been of so wondrous and gigantic a kind, the shiftings of the scenes in our stupendous drama have

been so rapid and various, that Shakespeare himself, in his wildest flights, has been completely distanced by the eccentricities of actual existence. Even he would scarcely have dared to have raised, in one act, a private adventurer to the greatest of European thrones,-to have conducted him, in the next, victorious over the necks of emperors and kings, and then, in a third, to have shewn him an exile, in a remote speck of an island, some thousands of miles from the scene of his triumphs; and the chariot which bore him along covered with glory, quietly exhibited to a gaping mechanical rabble under the roof of one of the beautiful buildings on the North Bridge of Edinburgh,→ (which buildings we heartily pray may be brought as low as the mighty po tentate whose Eagles are now to be seen looking out of their windows, like the fox from the ruins of Balclutha.) Our appetite, we say, for every sort of wonder and vehement interest, has in this way become so desperately inflamed, that especially as the world around us has again settled into its old dull state of happiness and legitimacy, we can be satisfied with nothing in fiction that is not highly coloured and exaggerated; we even like a story the better that it is disjointed and irregular, and our greatest inventors, accordingly, have been obliged to accommodate themselves to the taste of the age, more, we believe, than their own judgment can, at all times, have approved of. The very extravagance of the present production will now, therefore, be, perhaps, in its favour, since the events which have actually passed before our eyes have made the atmosphere of miracles that in which we most readily breathe.

A

The story opens with a voyage of discovery to the North Pole. young Englishman, whose mind had long been inflamed with this project, sets sail from Archangel, soon gets inclosed, as usual, among ice mountains, and is beginning to despair of success, when all his interest and thoughts are diverted suddenly into another channel, in consequence of a very singular adventure. One day a gigantic figure was seen moving northwards on a sledge, drawn by dogs, and a short time afterwards a poor emaciated wretch was picked up from a sledge that drifted close to the vessel. The Eng

lishma soon formed a violent friendship for this stranger, and discovers him to be a person of the greatest virtues, talents, and acquirements, which are only rendered the more admirable and interesting, from the deep cloud of melancholy which frequently overshadowed them. After a time, he gets so far into his confidence, as to obtain from him the story of his life and misfortunes. His name was Frankenstein, son of a Syndic of Geneva, and of an amiable mother, who very properly dies at the beginning of the book, to leave her son and a young female cousin, who resided in the family, so disconsolate, that they could find no comfort except by falling in love. Frankenstein had been left much to his own disposal in the conduct of his studies, and, at a very early period, he had become quite entété with some of the writings of the alchemists, on which he accidentally lighted; and we were at first in expectation that, like St Leon, he was to become possessed of the philosopher's stone, or of the elixir vitae. He is destined, however, to obtain a still more extraordinary power, but not from the alchemists, of the futility of whose speculations he soon be came convinced, but whose wild conceptions continued to give to his mind a strong and peculiar bias.

At the university, stimulated by the encouragement of some distinguished philosophers, he applied himself, with the utmost perseverance and ability, to every department of natural science, and soon became the general object of envy and admiration. His researches led him to investigate the principle of life, which he did in the old and approved manner by dissecting living animals, groping into all the repositories of the dead, and making himself acquainted with life and death in all their forms. The result was a most wonderful discovery,-quite simple, he says, when it was made, but yet one which he very wisely does not communicate to his English acquaintance, and which, of course, must remain a secret to the world,-no less than the discovery of the means of communicating life to an organized form. With this our young philosopher sets himself to make a man, and that he might make no blunder from taking too small a scale, unfortunately, as it turns out, his man is a giant. In a garret of his apartments, to which

none but himself was ever admitted, he employs four months on this wonderful production. Many of the ingredients seem to have been of a very disgusting description, since he passed whole nights in sepulchres raking them out; he thought, however, that he had succeeded in making a giant, as gainly in appearance at least as O'Brien, or the Yorkshire Boy, and every thing was now ready for the last touch of the master, the infusion of life into the inanimate mass. In breathless expectation, in the dead of night, he performed this last momentous act of creation; and the creature opened upon him two immense ghastly yellow eyes, which struck him with instant horror. He immediately hated himself and his work, and flew, in a state of feverish agony, to his room below; but, finding himself followed thither by the monster, he rushed out into the streets, where he walked about in fearful agitation, till the morning dawned, and they began to be frequented by their inhabitants. Passing along, he saw step from a coach an intimate friend of his from Geneva. For the moment he forgot every thing that had happened, was delighted to find that his friend had come to pursue his studies along with him, and was conducting him to his apartments, when on a sudden he recollected the dreadful inmate who would probably be found in them. He ran up and examined them, and, on finding that the monster had disappeared, his joy became quite foolish and outrageous; he danced about like a madman, and his friend was not surprised when immediately after he was seized by a delirious fever, which confined him for some weeks, alleviated, however, by all the attentions which friendship could bestow.

Scarcely had he recovered, when a sad piece of intelligence arrives from home. His father writes him that his little brother had strayed from them in an evening walk, and was at last found dead, and apparently strangled. He flies home to comfort his family, but it is night ere he reaches Geneva, and the gates being shut, he remains in the neighbourhood, and walks out in the dark towards the hills. The monster on a sudden stalks past him, and moving with inconceivable rapidity, is seen by him perched on one of the

mained for some days, till his differ ent senses learnt to perform their ap propriate functions, and he discovered the use of fire and various other rudi ments of knowledge; and thus accomplished, he ventured forth into the great world. But in the first village that he reached he was hooted and stoned, and was obliged to take shelter in a hovel at the back of a cottage. Through a crevice in the wall, he soon became intimate with all the operations in the cottage, the inhabitants of which were an old blind man, his son and daughter. After the reception he had met with in the village, he kept himself very snug in his hole through the day, but being really a good-natured monster, and finding the young man was much over wrought in cutting fuel for the family, what does he, but betake him to the wood in the night time, and collect quantities of fuel, which he piles up beside the door? The good people think themselves the favourites of some kind spirit or brownie. In the mean tiine, he learns how to apply their language, which he found he could imitate to lerably well. He gradually, too, becomes acquainted with more of their circumstances and feelings; and there was so much affection between the venerable blind man (who moreover played beautifully on a musical instrument) and his children, and they were so loving to each other, and they were so interesting withal from their poverty, that the worthy monster took a vehement passion for them, and had the greatest inclination to make himself agreeable to them. By close study, and the occurrence of favourable opportunities, he also acquires a knowledge of written language; and one day on his rambles, lighting on a portmanteau, which contained the Sorrows of Werter, a volume of Plutarch, and Milton's Paradise Lost, he becomes quite an adept in German sentiment, ancient heroism, and Satanic sturdiness. He now thought himself qualified to make himself acquainted with the family,-though aware of his hideous appearance, he very wisely began with the blind gentleman, on whom he ventured to make a call when the rest of the family were out of doors. He had just begun to interest the old man in his favour, when their tete-a-tête is un

luckily interrupted, and the poor monster is abused and maltreated as heretofore by the villagers. He flies to the woods, furious with rage, and disappointed affection; and, finding on his return that the cottagers had : forsaken the place, scared by his portentous visit, he amuses himself in his rage with setting it on fire, and then sets out in search of his creator. 0ther circumstances occur in his journey to give him a greater antipathy to the human race. He confesses the murder of the boy, whom, lighting upon, he wished to carry off, in the hope that he might find in him an object to attach himself to ;-the murder was partly accidental,-but the slipping the picture into Justine's pocket was a piece of devilish malice. He concludes with denouncing vengeance against Frankenstein and all his race, if he does not agree to one request, to create a female companion for him like himself, with whom he proposes to retire to the wilds of North America, and never again to come into contact with man.

It is needless to go minutely through the remainder of this wild fiction. After some demurring, Frankenstein at last accedes to the demand, and, begins a second time the abhorred creation of a human being, but again repents, and defies the demon; who thenceforth recommences his diabolical warfare against the unhappy philosopher,-destroys his friends and relations one by one, and finally murders his beloved Elizabeth, on the very evening of their marriage. Frankenstein, alive only to vengeance, now pursues the fiend over the world, and it was in this chace that he had got intothe neighbourhood of the North Pole, where he was but a little way behind him, but had quite spent himself in the pursuit. So ends the narrative of Frankenstein, and worn out nature soon after yields to the bitterness of his thoughts and his exhausted frame. He dies, and, to the astonishment of our Englishman and the crew, the monster makes his appearance,-laments the fate of his creator, says that his feelings of vengeance are tor ever at an end,-departs, and is heard of no more.

Such is a sketch of this singular performance, in which there is much power and beauty, both of thought and expression, though, in many parts, thie execution is imperfect, and