nally aroused—such as the sea-stories of Michael Scott, the exaggerated but often forcible inventions of Dr. ]Samuel Warren, and the crowning triumphs of Sir Bulwer Lytton. But "Marston" has high merits of its kind—and to those who relish the introduction of political and historical portraits, mingling on the stage of the action,—after the manner of Scott in "Peveril," or of the last-named maestro in "Devereux"—these "Memoirs of a Statesman," walking and talking with statesmen French and English, during the agitating years of the French Revolution, are replete with attraction. The principles in politics, the elucidation of which had occupied Dr. Croly's mind while engaged on the biographies of Burke and Pitt, he had now an opportunity of illustrating in the form, and with the vivid aids, and the appliances and means to boot, of fictitious narrative—philosophy teaching by example—and this opportunity he turned to account with skill, and with fair success. It involved the peril of indulgence in disquisition, and of postponing story to argumentative discourse (which the subscribers to Hookham's, Ebers', Mudie's, &c., profanely style "prosing"), and of making plot and passion yield the pas to dissertation and description; but the writer was too experienced in his craft, and too lively in his ideas, ever to become absolutely dry; too animated in his perceptions, and too graphic in the expression of them, ever to be voted unconditionally "slow,"—unless, peradventure, by some of those very "fast" fellows, who are themselves superlatively slow in their upper-works—in the mechanics (it were absurd, in their case, to say the dynamics) of νοῡς.
Of Dr. Croly's minor tales, one of the most remarkable is that entitled "Colonna the Painter," a tale of Italy and the Arts, with la Vendetta for its stirring, thrilling, all-absorbing theme. The conduct of the narrative is admirable; and the diction, like that of its imaginary manuscript, lofty and impassioned—occasionally rising into a sustained harmony, a rhythmical beauty and balance, consonant with the locale and the accessories of the story. There is masterly art in the narrator's prefiguration of the catastrophe by the picture in Colonna's Saloon, and his gradual development of the events of which it was the dark culmination. The whole is highly wrought, but without any of the strain and startling distortion of the French school. The "Tales of the Great St Bernard," so,e of which made a sensation when they appeared, we can do no more than name. And to the same nominative case, in the plural number, must be referred the diligent author's edition of Pope, his Reign of George the Fourth, and other miscellaneous works.
Theology falls not within our province; yet, omitting mention of the Rector of St. Stephen's (Walbrook) general performances in this department, we are tempted to bestow a parting word on that particular book of his, which, from the nature of its subject, of all others, it might seem our chiefest duty to leave undisturbed—his Commentary, namely, on the Apocalypse of St John the Divine. This exposition it is almost difficult to reconcile with our previous impressions of the writer, as a man of highly cultivated intellectual power, and gifted with much practical sagacity—indeed, one of his critics defines his intellectual distinction to be strong, nervous, and manly sense. But he is also of an imaginative and ardent temperament,—and to this he seems to have yielded the direction of his exegetical pen, when transporting himself in spirit to the isle called
