review, just as urgently as another class requires them in the melodrama and the romance. Mr. Gilfillan has talent that might be put to better uses. His fertile fancy, his often subtle insight, his singular range of language and wealth of illustration, might, if presided over by a correct taste and clear-sighted judgment, produce works of deep and enduring value. But as it is, he wilfully outrages good feeling and good sense by wayward sallies of bombast. He loves to start an arbitrary analogy, and make it ran all lengths, mad as a March hare; or he calls from the vasty deep of his chaotic fancy an imaginary antithesis, makes it his hobby for a page or two, mounts it with the furore of a wild huntsman, and rides it to death,
Over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire.[1]
Such passages are frequently composed—as it has been observed of the splendidi panni of a celebrated French author—under the guidance of the ear, the truths glanced at being lost in a torrent of jargon and verbiage: the intellect "pauses not, to take cognisance of the value of the thought, and of the very partial and limited extent to which it is either correct or applicable." Links of affinity are forged wholesale, and bound together in hot haste and most admired disorder. A trope is used as crutch to a lame argument, and a halting reason is borne off triumphantly by a suite of similes. A simile of Mr. Savage Landor's fabric may serve to prop up our own arguments and reasons against such writers in general:—"They carry stem and stern too high out of the water, and are more attentive to the bustling and bellying of the streamers than to the soundness of the must, the compactness of the deck, or the capacity and cleanliness of the hold."[2] And a bad sign of the times it is, when such literature is in request among young, thoughtful, and inquiring minds. Of such—and this is no worthless compliment—we believe Mr. Giifillan's audience mainly to consist. That the young amongst them will weary of his magnificence as they grow older, and the thoughtful as they compare notes, and the inquiring as they search below the surface, we are sufficiently convinced; but, meanwhile, serious injury is inflicted on the due adjustment and, harmonious development of their faculties, intellectual and: imaginative, by the diet of "forced-meat" piquancies, and over-spiced cuisine and honeyed sweetnesses, to which they habituate themselves in such a gorgeously decorated salle-à-manger. The climate and living of India do not improve the digestion or brace the constitution of its denizens. As little will the torrid splendours and "nest of spiceries" of the Gilfillan type of authorship invigorate the mental powers of any who are attracted thither by the report of gold mines and "diggings" extraordinary. "Blessed," as saith the Eastern proverb, "is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." Of the torrid splendours and Indian temperature of Mr. Gilfillan's style, profuse illustrations might be given. His passion for the sanguineous in all its shades is all-absorbing, and indulges itself ad libitum. A schoolboy, colouring his first attempt at a map, is not more lavish of marine blue in painting the ocean, and bays, and lakes, than is this literary porteait-painter of red in all its mixtures—the glowing crimson
- ↑ "Midsummer Night's Dream,” ii., 1.
- ↑ "Pericles and Aspasia," § cxxxiv.
