ial to a romance, belonging as it does
properly to the novel of actual life, in which the romantic element is
equally out of place. Fielding, accordingly, the greatest artist in
character since Shakspeare, hardly admits sentiment, and never romance,
into his master-pieces. Hawthorne, again, another great master, feeling
instinctively the poverty and want of sharp contrast in the externals of
our New England life, always shades off the edges of the actual, till,
at some indefinable line, they meet and mingle with the supersensual and
imaginative.

The author of "Sir Rohan" attempts character in Redruth the butler, and
in the villain and heroine of her story. We are inclined to think the
villain the best hit of the three, because he is downright scoundrel
without a redeeming point, as the Nemesis of the story required him to
be, and because he is so far a purely ideal character. But there is no
such thing possible as an ideal butler, at least in the sense our author
assumes in the cellar-scene. The better poet, the worse butler; and so
we are made impatient by his more than Redi-isms about wine, full of
fancy as they are in themselves, because they are an impertinence. For
the same reason, we forgive the heroine her rhapsodies about the figures
of the Arthur-romances, but cannot pardon her descents into real life
and her incursions on what should be the sanctuary of the
breakfast-table. The author attributes to her a dash of gypsy blood; and
if her style of humorous conversation be a fair type of that of the race
in general, we no longer wonder that they are homeless exiles from human
society. When will men learn the true nature of a pun,--that it is a
play upon ideas, and not upon sounds,--and that a perfect one is as rare
as a perfect poem?

In the prose "Edda," the dwarfs tell a monstrous fib, when they pretend
that Kvasir, the inventor of poetry, has been suffocated by his own
wisdom. Nevertheless, the little fellows showed thereby that they were
not short of intelligence; for it is almost always in their own overflow
that young poets are drowned. This superabundance seems to us the chief
defect in "Sir Rohan's Ghost." The superabundance is all very fine, of
the costliest kind; but was Clarence any the better for being done to
death in Malmsey instead of water?

This fault we look on as a fault of promise. There is always a chance
that luxuriance may be pruned, but none short of a miracle that a
broomstick may be m