the penalties incurred by their past.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Armadale._ A Novel. By WILKIE COLLINS. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Except for the fact that there is nothing at all automatic in his
inventions, there seems to be no good reason why Mr. Collins should not
make a perpetual motion. He has a surprising mechanical faculty, and
great patience and skill in passing the figures he contrives through the
programme arranged for them. Having read one of his novels, you feel as
if you had been amused with a puppet-show of rare merit, and you would
like to have the ingenious mechanician before the curtain. So much
cleverness, however, seems to be thrown away on the entertainment of a
single evening, and you sigh for its application to some work of more
lasting usefulness; and the perpetual motion occurs to you as the thing
worthiest such powers. Let it be a perpetual literary motion, if the
public please. Given a remarkable dream and a beautiful bad woman to
fulfil it; you have but to amplify the vision sufficiently, and your
beautiful bad woman goes on fulfilling it forever in tens of thousands
of volumes. As the brother of De Quincey said, when proposing to stand
on the ceiling, head downwards, and be spun there like a whip-top, thus
overcoming the attraction of gravitation by the mere rapidity of
revolution, "If you can keep it up for an instant, you can keep it up
all day." Alas! it is just at this point that the fatal defect of Mr.
Collins's mechanism appears. But for the artisan's hand, the complicated
work would not start at all, and we perceive that, if he lifted it for a
moment from the crank, the painfully contrived dream would drop to
pieces, and the beautiful bad woman would come to a jerky stand-still in
the midst of her most atrocious development. A perpetual literary motion
is therefore out of the question, so far as Mr. Collins is concerned;
and we can merely examine his defective machinery, with many a regret
that a plan so ingenious, and devices so labored and costly, should be
of no better effect.

We think, indeed, that all his stories are constructed upon a principle
as false to art as it is false to life. In this world, we have first men
and women, with certain well-known good and evil passions, and these
passions are the causes of all the events that happen in the world. We
doubt if it has occurred to any of our readers to see a set of
circumstances, even of the most relentles