d to be pushed to a more harrowing extravagance at
each successive imitation, Mr. Maturin would himself supply it....

We have omitted this miscreant's flippant allusion to Madame de Sevigne
and his own damnation, uttered in a spirit which (to use the author's
own words upon another occasion), "mingled ridicule with horror, and
seemed like a Harlequin in the infernal regions flirting with the
furies:"--But we must not forget to mention, as little characteristic
touches in this scene of preposterous horrors, that the monster who
describes it was also a parricide, and that the female, on whose dying
agonies he had feasted, was his only sister! After this appalling
extract, we need not pursue our quotations from pages which, as more
than one of the personages say of themselves, seem to swim in blood and
fire; and we shall conclude with the following passage from a dream--

The next moment I was chained to my chair again,--the fires were lit,
the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;--my feet were scorched to
a cinder,--my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh
consumed like shrinking leather,--the bones of my leg hung two black
withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;--it ascended,
caught my hair,--I was crowned with fire,--my head was a ball of
molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets:--I opened
my mouth, it drank fire,--I closed it, the fire was within,--and still
the bells rang on, and the crowd shouted, and the king and queen, and
all the nobility and priesthood looked on, and we burned and burned! I
was a cinder, body and soul, in my dream. II. 301.

These, and other scenes equally wild and abominable, luckily counteract
themselves;--they present such a Fee-fa-fum for grown up people, such a
burlesque upon tragic horrors, that a sense of the ludicrous
irresistibly predominates over the terrific; and, to avoid disgust, our
feelings gladly take refuge in contemptuous laughter. Pathos like this
may affect women, and people of weak nerves, with sickness at the
stomach;--it may move those of stouter fibre to scornful derision; but
we doubt whether, in the whole extensive circle of novel readers, it has
ever drawn a single tear. The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
has fortunately cleared our streets of the offensive vagrants who used
to thrust their mangled limbs and putrid sores into our faces to extort
from our disgust what they could not wring