A second objection which strikes us, in connexion with a habit of novel-reading, is the serious waste of time which it occasions.-This blame the Waverley Tales must, in their measure, share with the trash which loads the shelves of the circulating library; for it surely will not be pretended, that taking them generally, they pay their readers in profit for the consumption of time they occasion. In one view, they are more dangerous than ordinary novels; because, many persons whose age, or habits, or education, exempt them from the temptation of promiscuous novel-reading, are seduced by the talents of this author to devote more hours to his performances than they ought to subtract from their positive duties, or to dedicate to works of mere entertainment. Let any person calculate the number of solid hours expended in a large family, where, perhaps, thirty or more of these volumes have been perused by five or six individuals, or let him multiply this into the aggregate of the national reading, and he will probably be surprised at the vast consumption of time involved in the process. We are aware, that to a thorough novel-reader, time is an article of little or no value, except, like game to a sportsman, to be "killed;" but to persons not quite so far advanced in frivolity, the estimate may appear of more importance. We believe, that some serious and well-disposed persons would be shocked, were they care so to fully to number the hours which they devote annually to trifling reading; and then compare this startling record with the time given to the first great purpose of human existence. And is it not, we would ask, in the view of every reflecting man, an evil of incalculable magnitude, that the few remnants of time which persons, immersed in the business of the world, can spare for the occasional relaxation of their minds; for the amiable endearments of the social circle; for the instruction of their families; and for that private meditation and prayer, and that study of the Scriptures, which are so necessary to fit them to bear up against the temptations of the world, and " pass through things temporal that finally they lose not the things eternal," instead of being improved for beneficial purposes, should be engrossed and rendered pernicious by an indulgence in frivolous, not to say noxious, reading. In this view it is not necessary that every volume, or any one volume, should be of a decidedly exceptionable tendency; it is enough for our argument, if the general result is such that the individual is not benefited, that his family has been neglected, and that his general train of thought and feeling, already too secular, has been debased instead of elevated; has been alienated from God and heaven, instead of being attracted to them by his few select moments of retirement and leisure. A third injurious effect attendant on the generality of those works of fictitious narrative, which form the subject of our observations, arises from the false and dangerous views which they present of the actual circumstances of life.— It is a prime secret for happiness to learn the art of lowering our expectations; to be satisfied with a little; to be content with the state of life in which we are placed; to improve, and thus to enjoy, the present hour, and to look for no per fection either in men or things. But how different the lessons taught by the bulk of poets and novelists! Extatic joy and insupportable sorrow are almost the only conditions of life for which their scale is graduated. The mediocrity of talent, of property, and of personal endowment, which generally presents itself in the actual intercourse of mankind, is banished from their ideal world. Men are heroes, and women are angels: love is the master passion; and the pursuit of a cap tivating object the great business of human existence. Now it is impossible that a person can habitually enter with full zest into the spirit of this fictitious creation, without feeling a little dissatisfied with the tame realities of the actual scene of his own "work-day" state of being. The best, the most natural, of mere novels, must necessarily be overcharged; their lights must be made brighter than the reality, to give contrast to their shadows; and their shadows darker than the reality, to give effect to their lights. But young and inexperienced persons will not easily be persuaded to believe that these fascinating representations are fabulous true, they do not find the prototypes among their own relations and acquaintance; but then, they doubt not they are to be found elsewhere: they succeed in persuading themselves that they shall meet with more sentiment, and more sensibility, and more exquisite joys, and more pungent sorrows, in some other more favoured region, than they have yet been able to trace in that which happens to lie within the bounds of their daily vision: the enchanted paradise exists, though hitherto it has not been their happy fate to discover its precincts. Surely nothing can be more ensnaring to ardent and youthful minds, or more calculated to destroy that tranquil acquiescence in the allotments of Providence which forms a grand constituent in human happiness, than CHRIST, OBSERV. No. 244. such highly wrought exhibitions of ideal scenes and characters. And,what we think has not been sufficiently dwelt upon by those who have reprobated novels on account of their splendid fictions, -even where scenes in real life are displayed, and displayed faithfully, they may, to many readers, have all the evil effect of the most intoxicating ideal world. To a young man or woman in a humble station, many even of the ordinary incidents of novels may thus be fatally injurious. To wear silk stockings, and go to the play, may appear as alluring a phantom to a lady's maid in a country village, as, to her more sentimental mistress, to be a Clementina della Peretta, or, if our readers will, a Minna Troil. And what is the next step? We refer to other pages than our own for an answer. The annals of the Magdalen and Lock Hospitals, and of the Guardian Society, if the secret history of the first aberrations of the heart could always be known, would too probably furnish many a record of the baneful effects of habits of novel-reading on ignorant and inexperienced minds. With regard to the Waverley Tales, we have before admitted that the excitement of the passions is not by any means their characteristic quality; yet we cannot exempt them from the charge of exhibiting delusive and injurious views of human life. We need go no farther than the novel immediately before us; for who among the young admirers of these imaginary scenes, would contentedly sit down amidst books or ledgers, or engross parchment, or follow any regular honest vocation, if he could spend his life like Mordaunt Mertoun, free as an eagle, and without a care or a thought beyond wandering from crag to crag, encountering the perils, and enjoying the pleasures, of an adventurous sportsman, and relaxing from these rougher joys in the society of the beautiful and fascinating inmates of Burg Westra? 21 reader was in very little danger of making any application to himself: the virtues and crimes were equally beyond the sphere of his activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers, and persecutors, as with beings of another species. But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama as may be the lot of any other man, young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their own practices. If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account, or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shews all that presents itself with. out discrimination. It is not a sufficient vindication of a narrative, that the train of events is agreeable to observation and experience; for that observation which is called knowledge of the world, will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good." We are not sure that the habits of the bold jovial Pirates themselves would not find admirers; and we fear that poor Minna is not singular in her attachment to the freebooter Cleveland. But we shall have occasion to advert to the evil effects arising from the way in which characters are delineated in novels, in a subsequent part of our remarks. What we intend exclusively to allege in the present argument, is, that professed novels are almost always unlike real life; and that the dissimilarity is such as to lead to the formation of false and injurious estimates of its actual nature. Even the novels of the author of Waverley, whose graphic skill no person can dispute, present us, when calmly considered, with very little more than the figments of his own splendid imagination. It is true that by his enchantments he, not only raises new worlds before us, but for the time has power almost to make us believe them real. But when we close the volume, and look around our apartment to be sure of our own identity, and coolly ask, whether even his comparatively temperate representations-we had Connected with the last mentioned almost said his historical memo- objection, there is another, already randa-are not mere romance, we partially adverted to, arising from cannot but feel that we have been, the injurious delineations of characif not absolutely in an ideal world, ter which abound in most novels and yet in a still more perplexing scene, other works of imagination, written compounded so indiscriminately of for the mere purpose of entertaintruth and fable, that no beneficial ment. The historian of real life moral impression, nor any valuable is not responsible for the actions lesson of experience, much less any and qualities of his personages. certain matter of fact, is gained Like a portrait painter, his chief from the narrative. And were it study must be accuracy of delineaperfectly true that the whole is tion: as to beauty and grouping, strictly natural, yet this would not and many other things of prime obviate the evil effects of a novel in importance in a fancy piece, he is which virtue and vice-we must not, answerable only so far as he can we suppose, use more strictly theo- avail himself of them without viological phrases are not the con- lating the laws of truth and nature. stant test by which the whole con- And happily, in general, in real life, duct of the story is regulated. It a really correct description is selwas justly remarked by Dr. John- dom dangerous. The novel before son, that "in the romances for- us furnishes a case strongly in merly written, every transaction point. The incident on which it is and sentiment were so remote from founded, is described by the author all that passes among men, that the in his historic capacity as follows: "In the month of January 1724-5, a ves. sel, called the Revenge, bearing twenty large guns, and six smaller, commanded by John Gow, or Goffe, or Smith, came to the Orkney Islands, and was discovered to be a pirate, by various acts of insolence and villany committed by the crew. These were for some time submitted to, the inhabitants of these remote islands not possessing arms nor means of resistance; and so bold was the captain of these banditti, that he not only came ashore, and gave dancing parties in the village of Stromness, but, before his real character was discover ed, engaged the affections and received the troth-plight of a young lady, possessed of some property. A patriotic individual, James Fea, younger of Clestron, formed the plan of securing the buccaneer, which he effected by a mixture of courage and address, in consequence chiefly of Gow's vessel having gone on shore near the harbour of Calf-sound, on the island of Eda, not far distant from a house then inhabited by Mr. Fea. In the various stratagems by which Mr. Fea contrived finally, at the peril of his life, they being well armed and desperate, to make the whole pirates his prisoners, he was much aided by Mr. James Laing, the grandfather of the late Malcolm Laing, Esq. the acute and ingenious historian of Scotland during the seven teenth century. "Gow, and others of his crew, suffered by sentence of the High Court of Admiralty, the punishment their crimes had long deserved. He conducted himself with great audacity when before the Court; and, from an account of the matter by an eye-witness, seems to have been subjected to some unusual severities, in order to compel him to plead. The words are these: John Gow would not plead, for which he was brought to the bar, and the judge ordered that his thumbs should be squeezed by two men, with a whip-cord, till it did break; and then it should be doub. led, till it did again break, and then laid threefold, and that the executioners should pull with their whole strength; which sentence Gow endured with a great deal of boldness.' The next morning, (27th May, 1725,) when he had seen the preparations for pressing him to death, his courage gave way, and he told the Marshal of Court, that he would not have given so much trouble had he been assured of not being hanged in chains. He was then tried, con demned, and executed, with others of his crew." Vol. I. pp. i—iv. No reader, however young or inexperienced, is likely to be injured by such a description. The only sympathy we feel for the lawless plunderer is that which arises from the cruelty of his judges. Abating this, all our feelings in perusing the narrative are on the side of moral and poetical justice. But let the reader compare this with the description of the bold, enterprising, generous Cleveland, in the novel; the young and handsome adventurer, whose humanity is the only blot on his piratical escutcheon; and he will instantly be sensible that what is perfectly safe, and may even have a moral tendency, when related as history, is very capable of being rendered pernicious when exhibited in the false colouring of fictitious narra tive. A painter of imaginary scenes is bound in duty to endeavour to make his reader love, as well as coldly approve, whatever is truly good; and to hate, as well as feebly censure, whatever is of a contrary character. But is this done in the majority of novels? Is it always done even in the comparatively guarded pages of the author of Waverley? Far from it. What is Cleveland? A gentleman pirate, capable by his person and address, and still more by his manly qualities, his generosity, his devotedness to his unhappy crew, and his sentimentalism of character, of attracting, and, as is too much insinuated, of deserving, the regard of Instead the heroine of the tale. of being conducted to a gibbet, he is suffered honourably to enter the service of his country, and to die "in the field of glory." And what shall we say of the character of the heroine, Minna Troil, herself? High-spirited, imaginative, and approaching the sublime in her mysterious developments, she yet attaches herself to a pirate,under the idea that a pirate resembled one of those lawless, but of course-or the moral would not be complete-brave and generous spirits who reigned in a former age by terror and devastation over the Northern seas and islands. The whole delineation of her character is dangerous and delusive to a young and romantic mind; and we believe that many a visionary heroine would infinitely prefer becoming a Minna Troil in "The Pirate," to imitating the modest, sensible, tender, persevering, and Christian-but, alas! homely-Jeannie Deans in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian." Will it be credited that this same Minna, who is made to engross the chief sympathy of the story-far more so than her artless and lovely sister Brenda-should have reason to suppose that a man is being murdered under her window; that that man is no other than Mordaunt Mertoun, the playmate of her infancy, the companion of her youth, the attached friend of her sister; that his murderer is a bold, quarrelsome, overbearing stranger, an acknowledged freebooter-and yet that she forbears to alarm the family, to call for assistance to rescue the victim, and to pursue the supposed murderer, because, forsooth, "what a tale had she to tell! and of whom was that tale to be told!" Thus, like a truly faithful heroine of a novel, with whom blind passion is to swallow up every principle of duty and common humanity, she seals her lips in secrecy; her attachment to Cleveland is not at all abated; and though to be sure there is occasionally a half-moral reflection, and though she makes up her mind, under all the conflicting circumstances of the case, to discard the Pirate as a lover and a husband, yet the whole interest of the piece is so contrived as to be almost constantly in opposition to the impartial dictates of a virtuous judg ment. The character of the Udaller himself is open to somewhat similar exceptions. History would have described him as a drunken, glut tonous, overbearing, low-lived, swearing, and passionate fellow, who kept his dependents in good humour by a vicious prodigality, and whose character was only relieved by a sort of jovial good nature, and a tender attachment to his daughters. From such a deli neation, no moral injury could have resulted. But the skill of the novelist has so dressed up this mere ale-house pot-companion that the reader is taught almost to respect him, and very sincerely to shake him by the hand, as one of the best, most generous, most hospitable, most frank, most hearty fellows in the world. The character of Bryce Snailsfoot, the Jagger, is still more exceptionable. He is represented as a base, sneaking, pilfering, lying, and cheating rascal, whose only claim not to be detested is, that he is only worthy of being despised. Yet this wretch is, forsooth, a canting hypocrite, and talks of religion! The better characters of the tale make little or no pretensions to Christianity; unless perhaps Minna and Brenda saying their prayers be an exception: as for Mordaunt Mertoun he seems scarcely to have ever heard of a God. But the weak, or selfish, or ridiculous characters, such as Triptolemus and sister Baby, have religious phrases always on their lips, and profess to consult the dictates of conscience in their most unhallowed actions. The climax, however, is to frame such a character as Bryce Snailsfoot, or, as the author is pleased to call him," the devout Bryce Snailsfoot;" but whose " devotion" is generally so contrived as to break out just when, for the honour of religion, it could best be spared. He lived by plundering wrecks, "for which," says the author, " being a man who in his own way professed great devotion, he seldom failed to express his grateful thanks to Heaven." So again, when Mordaunt Mertoun, indignant at the Jagger's inhumanity in deliberately |