Let us not dash the image from the altar, nor quench the fire
at the shrine, before we have another idol and another shrine to give to
the old worshippers, who must worship still. Such reckless iconoclasm is
too dangerous. It is in this point of discretion that our author is most
reprehensible. The moral tone of his works might have been improved had
his independent tendencies been rather more judiciously indulged. There
is, however, one character of loveliness and purity almost sufficient to
leaven the whole mass and to dash our entire reprehension. In all the
scope of our novel reading, nowhere do we remember to have met a more
exquisitely charming character than that of fair Constance Brandon.
Every charm of spirit and of person is lavished upon her. At the same
time she is conceived with faultless taste. No feeble extravagance
offends our feelings; no tinsel or affectation thwarts our admiration.
The execution is worthy of the thought, which is simply beautiful. The
portrait is like Raphael's divinest Madonna, with the changing radiance
and velvety warmth of life thrown into the matchless face. Why could we
not have had more such, instead of such indifferent domesticities as La
Mignonne?

When we say that none of these three novels are destined to pass into
the eternal literature of the language, we pass no very harsh or damning
judgment. Men of the highest powers must bow to the same decree. Our
author, though his thews and sinews are stalwart, is yet hardly cast in
the mould to indicate such excessive vitality. He can hardly trouble the
stride of those lordly veterans of the turf, Scott or Thackeray; yet
without exertion spurning the rearward turf, he clicks his galloping
hoofs in the faces of the throng of the ordinary purveyors of fiction.
His fancy is exuberant; his imagination brilliant, florid, verging at
times almost upon the apoplectic. But the cognate mental member,
invention, is most sadly destitute of free and sweeping action. His
plots are of the simplest, and betray indubitably a numbness or
imperfect development of the inventive faculties of the brain. People
who read novels for the denouement, who ride a steeple chase through
them, leaping a five-page fence here, a ditch of a chapter there, and
anon clearing at a mighty bound a rasper of some score or more
paragraphs, resolute simply to be in at the death in the last chapter,
anxious to see the wedding torches extinguished, and the printer setting
up