elf.
This is the case also with the story of St. Leon, which, with less
dramatic interest and intensity of purpose, is set off by a more
gorgeous and flowing eloquence, and by a crown of preternatural imagery,
that waves over it like a palm-tree! It is the beauty and the charm of
Mr. Godwin's descriptions that the reader identifies himself with the
author; and the secret of this is, that the author has identified
himself with his personages. Indeed, he has created them. They are the
proper issue of his brain, lawfully begot, not foundlings, nor the
"bastards of his art." He is not an indifferent, callous spectator of
the scenes which he himself pourtrays, but without seeming to feel them.
There is no look of patch-work and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness
of borrowed wealth; no tracery-work from worm-eaten manuscripts, from
forgotten chronicles, nor piecing out of vague traditions with fragments
and snatches of old ballads, so that the result resembles a gaudy,
staring transparency, in which you cannot distinguish the daubing of the
painter from the light that shines through the flimsy colours and gives
them brilliancy. Here all is clearly made out with strokes of the
pencil, by fair, not by factitious means. Our author takes a given
subject from nature or from books, and then fills it up with the ardent
workings of his own mind, with the teeming and audible pulses of his own
heart. The effect is entire and satisfactory in proportion. The work
(so to speak) and the author are one. We are not puzzled to decide upon
their respective pretensions. In reading Mr. Godwin's novels, we know
what share of merit the author has in them. In reading the _Scotch
Novels_, we are perpetually embarrassed in asking ourselves this
question; and perhaps it is not altogether a false modesty that prevents
the editor from putting his name in the title-page--he is (for any thing
we know to the contrary) only a more voluminous sort of Allen-a-Dale.
At least, we may claim this advantage for the English author, that the
chains with which he rivets our attention are forged out of his own
thoughts, link by link, blow for blow, with glowing enthusiasm: we see
the genuine ore melted in the furnace of fervid feeling, and moulded
into stately and _ideal_ forms; and this is so far better than peeping
into an old iron shop, or pilfering from a dealer in marine stores!
There is one drawback, however, attending this mode of proceeding, which
attaches ge