glaring. No writer of good judgment would have attempted to revive the
defunct horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe's School of Romance, or the demoniacal
incarnations of Mr. Lewis: But, as if he were determined not to be
arraigned for a single error only, Mr. Maturin has contrived to render
his production almost as objectionable in the manner as it is in the
matter. The construction of his story, which is singularly clumsy and
inartificial, we have no intention to analyze:--many will probably have
perused the work, before our review reaches them; and to those who have
not, it may be sufficient to announce, that the imagination of the
author runs riot, even beyond the usual license of romance;--that his
hero is a modern Faustus, who has bartered his soul with the powers of
darkness for protracted life, and unlimited worldly enjoyment;--his
heroine, a species of insular goddess, a virgin Calypso of the Indian
ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs and tamarinds;
associates with peacocks, loxias and monkeys; is worshipped by the
occasional visitants of her island; finds her way to Spain, where she is
married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of
a murdered domestic being the witness of their nuptials; and finally
dies in the dungeons of the Inquisition at Madrid!--To complete this
phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers;
parricides; maniacs in abundance; monks with scourges pursuing a naked
youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the
skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning;
Irish hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and
Donna Isidoras, all opposed to each other in glaring and violent
contrast, and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating
display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language. Such are
the materials, and the style of this expanded nightmare: And as we can
plainly perceive, among a certain class of writers, a disposition to
haunt us with similar apparitions, and to describe them with a
corresponding tumor of words, we conceive it high time to step forward
and abate a nuisance which threatens to become a besetting evil, unless
checked in its outset.

Political changes were not the sole cause of the rapid degeneracy in
letters that followed the Augustan era of Rome. Similar corruptions and
decay have succeeded to the intellectual eminence of other nations; and
w