ases,
the purpose in the latter; but one of the means by which this increase
is effected has certainly lost--whether it may or may not ever
recover--its attraction, except to a student of literary history who is
well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that
Chateaubriand's elaborate adoption, from Tasso and Milton, of the system
of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and
interferences with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy,
instance of that general Romantic _reversion_ to earlier literary
devices, and even atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic
personage who rests enisled off Saint-Malo was so great an apostle. And
it was probably effectual for its time. Classicists could not quarrel
with it, for it had its precedents, indeed its origin, in Homer and
Virgil; Romanticists (of that less exclusive class who admitted the
Renaissance as well as the Dark and Middle Ages) could not but welcome
it for its great modern defenders and examples. I cannot say that I
enjoy it: but I can tolerate it, and there is no doubt at all, odd as it
may seem to the merely twentieth-century reader, that it did something
to revive the half-extinct religiosity which had been starved and
poisoned in the later days of the _ancien regime_, forcibly suppressed
under the Republic, and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic
system. In _Les Martyrs_ it has even a certain "grace of congruity,"[28]
but in regard to _Les Natchez_, with which we are for the moment
concerned, almost enough (with an example or two to come presently) has
been said about it.

The book, as a whole, suffers, unquestionably and considerably, from the
results of two defects in its author. He was not born, as Scott was a
little later, to get the historical novel at last into full life and
activity; and it would not be unfair to question whether he was a born
novelist at all, though he had not a few of the qualifications necessary
to the kind, and exercised, coming as and when he did, an immense
influence upon it. The subject is too obscure. Its only original
_vates_, Charlevoix, though always a respectable name to persons of some
acquaintance with literature and history, has never been much more,
either in France or in England. The French, unluckily for themselves,
never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while they
had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours afterwards,
and those o