luck in the production of highly
successful plays and novels. To succeed in this department of
imaginative writing, it is not enough that the author has literary
power and skill. Else why do the failures of every great novelist and
playwright almost always outnumber the successes? Even Shakspeare offers
no exception to the fact. What a descent from "Hamlet" to "Titus
Andronicus," from "Othello" to "Cymbeline"! Miss Bronte writes "Jane
Eyre," and fails ever afterwards to come up to her own standard. Bulwer
delights us with "The Caxtons," and then sinks to the dulness of "The
Strange Story." Dickens gives us "Oliver Twist," and then tries the
patience of confiding readers in "Martin Chuzzlewit." We will not
undertake to analyze all the reasons for these startling discrepancies;
but one obvious reason is _infelicity in the choice of a subject_. A
subject teeming with the right capabilities will often enable an
ordinary playwright to produce a drama that will rouse an audience to
wild enthusiasm; whereas, if the subject is un-pregnant with dramatic
issues, not even genius can invest it with the charm that commands the
sympathy and attention of the many. Watch a large, miscellaneous
audience, as it listens, rapt, intent, and weeping, to Kotzebue's
"Stranger," and see the same audience as it tries to attend to
Talfourd's "Ion." Yet here it is the hack writer who succeeds and the
true poet who fails. Why? Because the former has hit upon a subject
which gives him at once the advantage of nearness to the popular heart,
while the latter has selected a theme remote and unsympathetic.

In "Peculiar" Mr. Sargent has had the luck, if we may so call it, of
finding the materials for his plot in incidents which carry in
themselves so much of dramatic power that a story is evolved from them
with the facility and inevitableness of a fate. When the United States
forces under General Butler occupied New Orleans, certain developments
connected with the workings of "the peculiar institution" were made,
which showed a state of social degradation of which we had not supposed
even Slavery capable. It appeared that women, so white as to be
undistinguishable from the fairest Anglo-Saxons, were held as slaves,
lashed as slaves, subjected to all the indignities which irresponsible
mastership involves.

"Peculiar" derives its title from one of the characters of the novel, an
escaped negro slave, who has received from his sportive master the name
o