ond the scope of
Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the
law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign
directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His
ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his
hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames,
and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they
wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to
European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of
their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and
Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if
the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they
lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their
visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and
consistency. Their imaginations are not active--for to be active is to
call something into act and form--but passive, as men in sick dreams.
For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of
nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all,
and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the
treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment
might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little
wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life,
that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more
deviate from nature--show more of that inconsequence, which has a
natural alliance with frenzy,--than a great genius in his "maddest
fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is
acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels,--as they existed some
twenty or thirty years back,--those scanty intellectual viands of the
whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled
for ever the innutritious phantoms,--whether he has not found his
brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and
where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent
incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some
third-rate love intrigue--where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour
and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and
Bond-street--a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than
he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the
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