e the
more necessary to insist on this canon, that the inferior appliances of
the art--the description of manners, scenery, dresses, buildings,
processions, pomps, ceremonies, and customs--has opened so wide a field
for digression, that, by many writers as well as readers, they have come
to be supposed to form its principal object. This mistake is in an
especial manner conspicuous in the writings of Ainsworth, whose talents
for description, and the drawing of the horrible, have led him to make his
novels often little more than pictorial phantasmagoria. It is to be seen,
also, in a great degree in James; who although capable, as many of his
works, especially _Mary of Burgundy_, _Attila_, and the _Smugglers_,
demonstrate, of the most powerful delineation of passion, and the finest
traits of the pathetic--is yet so enamoured of description, and so
conscious of his powers in that respect, that he in general overlays his
writings with painting to the eye, instead of using that more powerful
language which speaks to the heart. It is no doubt a curious thing, and
gives life to the piece, to see a faithful and graphic description of a
knight on horseback, with his companion, and their respective squires,
skirting a wood, mounted on powerful steeds, on a clear September morning.
The painting of his helm and hauberk, his dancing plume and glancing mail,
his harnessed steed and powerful lance, interests once or even twice; but
it is dangerous to try the experiment of such descriptions too often. They
rapidly pall by repetition, and at length become tedious or ridiculous. It
is in the delineation of the human heart that the inexhaustible vein of
the novelist is to be found; it is in its emotion, desires, and passions,
ever-varying in externals, ever the same in the interior, that scope is
afforded for the endless conceptions of human genius. Descriptions of
still life--pictures of scenery, manners, buildings, and dresses--are the
body, as it were, of romance; they are not its soul. They are the material
parts of the landscape; its rocks, mountains, and trees; they are not the
divine ray of the sun which illuminates the brilliant parts of the
picture, and gives its peculiar character to the whole. The skilful artist
will never despise them; on the contrary, he will exert himself to the
utmost in their skilful delineation, and make frequent use of them, taking
care to introduce as much variety as possible in their representations.
But