Taylor had in his head the Christian of
the New Testament, or whether he drew from those members of the "religious
world" who make manifest the religious flesh and the religious devil, {189}
cannot be decided by us, and perhaps was not known to himself. If a
heathen, he was a virtuous one.

A NEW ERA IN FICTION.

(1795.) This is the date of a very remarkable paradox. The religious
world--to use a name claimed by a doctrinal sect--had long set its face
against amusing literature, and all works of imagination. Bunyan, Milton,
and a few others were irresistible; but a long face was pulled at every
attempt to produce something readable for poor people and _poor children_.
In 1795, a benevolent association began to circulate the works of a lady
who had been herself a dramatist, and had nourished a pleasant vein of
satire in the society of Garrick and his friends; all which is carefully
suppressed in some biographies. Hannah More's[424] _Cheap Repository
Tracts_,[425] which were bought by millions of copies, destroyed the
vicious publications with which the hawkers deluged the country, by the
simple process of furnishing the hawkers with something more saleable.

_Dramatic fiction_, in which the _characters_ are drawn by themselves, was,
at the middle of the last century, the monopoly of writers who required
indecorum, such as Fielding and Smollett. All, or nearly all, which could
be permitted to the young, was dry narrative, written by people who could
not make their personages _talk character_; they all spoke {190} alike. The
author of the _Rambler_[426] is ridiculed, because his young ladies talk
Johnsonese; but the satirists forget that all the presentable novel-writers
were equally incompetent; even the author of _Zeluco_ (1789)[427] is the
strongest possible case in point.

Dr. Moore,[428] the father of the hero of Corunna,[429] with good narrative
power, some sly humor, and much observation of character, would have been,
in our day, a writer of the _Peacock_[430] family. Nevertheless, to one who
is accustomed to our style of things, it is comic to read the dialogue of a
jealous husband, a suspected wife, a faithless maid-servant, a tool of a
nurse, a wrong-headed pomposity of a priest, and a sensible physician, all
talking Dr. Moore through their masks. Certainly an Irish soldier does say
"by Jasus," and a cockney footman "this here" and "that there"; and this
and the like is all the painting of characters which