eir books
are noticed in the public journals without any allusions to the
Association for the prevention of vice, but rather with the praises
which, in other times and countries, would have been bestowed on works
of genius and virtue. The taste of the English public has certainly
deteriorated within the last few years; and popularity, the surest index
of the public's likings, though not of the writer's deservings, has
attended works of which the great staple has been crime and
blackguardism. A certain rude power, a sort of unhealthy energy, has
enabled the writer to throw an interest round pickpockets and murderers;
and if this interest were legitimately produced, by the exhibition of
human passions modified by the circumstances of the actor--if it arose
from the development of one real, living, thinking, doing, and suffering
man's heart, we could only wonder at the author's choice of such a
subject, but we should be ready to acknowledge that he had widened our
sphere of knowledge--and made us feel, as we all do, without taking the
same credit for it to ourselves that the old blockhead in France does,
that being human, we have sympathies with all, even the lowest and
wickedest of our kind. But the interest those works excite arises from
no such legitimate source--not from the development of our common
nature, but from the creation of a new one--from startling contrasts,
not of two characters but of one--tenderness, generosity in one page;
fierceness and murder in the next. But though our English _tastes_ are
so far deteriorated as to tolerate, or even to admire, the records of
cruelty and sin now proceeding every day from the press--our English
_morals_ would recoil with horror from the deliberate wickedness which
forms the great attraction of the French modern school of romance. The
very subjects chosen for their novels, by the most popular of their
female writers, shows a state of feeling in the authors more dreadful to
contemplate than the mere coarse raw-head-and-bloody-bones descriptions
of our chroniclers of Newgate. A married woman, the heroine--high in
rank, splendid in intellect, radiant in beauty--has for the hero a
villain escaped from the hulks. There is no record of his crimes--we are
not called upon to follow him in his depredations, or see him cut
throats in the scientific fashion of some of our indigenous rascals. He
is the philosopher,--the instructor--the guide. The object of _his_
introduction is to sh