the best of meats in its own malignant humour."
And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and
"pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in
Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of
that nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but
it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina
and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be
thought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary
politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is more
certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of
the world, nor the man to walk in that way.

_Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both these
books. Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit
him with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is
quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the
_Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's
scheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any
form definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of his
ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.

The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It
was not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations
of imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred,
and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no
time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its
oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greek
romance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period
of the literature to which it belonged. The pure mediaeval romance of
chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The
_Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately
preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, in
increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and
sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great
qualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded in
attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of
variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its
favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the
c