Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/205

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ROMANCE AND REALITY.
199

sufficiently vigorous or sufficiently original to create their own taste, or give their tone to the time; and this is what this author is doing and will do. Pelham took up a ground quite untouched. There had been fashionable novels, and of real life, so called; but they wanted either knowledge, or talent to give that knowledge likeness. But the author of Pelham was the first who said, such and such beings exist—such and such principles are now acted upon—and out of such will I constitute my hero. Nothing proves the life thrown into the picture so much as the offence it gave—so many respectable individuals took the hero's coxcombry as a personal affront."

Edward Lorraine.—"I think these works go very far to support our theory of the novel—that it is like the Roman empire, sweeping all under its dominion. Pelham is the light satire of Horace—Paul Clifford the severer page of Juvenal—the Disowned has the romantic and touching beauty of poetry—while Devereux is rather the product of the philosopher and the metaphysician."

Mr. Morland.—"I should judge—though it seems almost a paradox to say so of one whose pages are mostly so witty and so worldly—