verley novels, we bid defiance to the whole race of scolding wives.

In process of time, the dynasty of declamatory spinsters and dowagers, passed over to this western hemisphere, and made their debut under various names, but without changing their individuality. One can always tell the stock whence they sprang, and detect the strong family likeness, however it may be disguised or caricatured. That they have lost nothing of the charm of eloquence, with which they were originally gifted by the enchanter, Sir Walter Scott, will sufficiently appear, from a short analysis, and occasional extracts from the work which has given occasion to the preceding observations.

It is not pretended that there is any thing new in what we have said, or have to say, on this subject. But from the application of these, and the hints which follow, to the situation and the literature of our country, it is possible that something may be drawn, which may be useful to succeeding writers. We have no other object in these remarks.

York Town, although it professes to be a "Historical Romance," has very little connexion with the real history of this country. The scene, it is true, closes at York Town, shortly af ter the surrender of Lord Cornwallis; but the denouement is very little dependant upon that event.. The principal actors who control the conduct of the piece, and on whose agency the whole machinery depends, are foreigners. Colonel Walstein, and Maude Mansel, are both natives of Germany; and the following passage, taken from the close of the second volume, furnishes the key to their connexion, as well as to the mysterious influence the latter exercises over the former.

"He," colonel Walstein, "was the last descendant of a once powerful family, from which he inherited nothing, save a noble name, and the mouldering and almost uninhabitable ruins of an ancestral castle. But love promised to atone for the neglect of fortune. Matilda, or as she was usually called, Maude Steinkirk, was then in the first bloom of youth and beauty. Walstein saw her, and was captivated. Her father, a man of immense wealth, but without hereditary rank, willingly consented to bestow his daughter on one of noble birth. Maude was an only daughter, and the doting fondness, and extreme indulgence of her parents, had conspired to nurture all the foibles of her naturally strong mind, and to pervert those qualities, which, properly disciplined and directed, might have ripened into superior excellence. As it was, she grew up the creature of impulse; the sport of every wayward passion: and the purest and most elevated of human affections, became the source of all those crimes and miseries, which marked her after life, and rendered her the basest and most wretched of her sex. Her betrayer, weary of a conquest won too lightly to be prized, soon quitted her; and, overwhelmed with shame, and conscious guilt, she fled with one whom she had often spurned, and became an exile from her home and country. "Her brother sought the seducer of his sister, and challenged him; they fought, and young Steinkirk fell by his adversary's first fire. Walstein was forced to quit the army, and seek safety in flight. Shame and suspicion followed him everywhere, and there was no rest for him, till he reached the shores of America. He entered into the service of its sovereign, and when the conquest of Canada re

stored peace to its borders, he married the sister of Edward Leslie's father, and established himself in Virginia, the birthplace of his wife. He had married from prudential motives, and was a stern and cold husband to one who had given him a heart warm with the tenderest and purest love. His early hopes had been blighted-blighted by the mildew of his own irregular passions; and, exiled from his country, severed from the friends and attachments of his early years, his mind became embittered; and gloom and discontent engendered misanthropic feelings, which deepened his hatred to the world, and made him shun society.

Shortly after his marriage, accident renewed his intercourse with Maude Steinkirk. She had preceded him to America, and married the man who was the companion of her flight; but he became the wretched victim of her ill humour and caprice; the object of those angry upbraidings and querulous complaints, in which her proud and disdainful spirit was wont to indulge itself. Yet all that was once kindly in her nature, had not quite deserted her; but it soon withered, beneath an influence which nothing pure or good could long survive. She formed a new league with her betrayer; a league which involved the fate of more than one individual, and which was deeply stained with guilt and falsehood. One step led to another, and they plunged deeper and deeper into sin, till they found themselves entangled beyond all hope of extrication. Their mutual upbraidings, threats, and recrimination, increased the mutual hatred which had gradually usurped the place of a more passionate sentiment, and converted every vestige of former tenderness, into the gall of utter detestation and abhorrence. Maude was regarded by him, as the being who had quenched his hopes of fame, and darkened the fairest prospects of his youth; as the cause of all those misfortunes, and all that wretchedness, whose origin he should have sought in the wickedness of his own heart, and the unrestrained indulgence of his own corrupt passions.'

The detestation of Maude, on the other hand, is not a whit behind that of the colonel; and these two amiable beings never meet without quarrelling most bitterly., The colonel has a nephew and niece, to whom he is guardian, and Maude a son, to whom she is determined this fair lady shall be married. The colonel, on the other hand, for some inscrutable reasons, is as determined that she shall marry colonel Clifford, a British officer, whom we find a frequent visitor at his house. The young lady is however resolved to please herself, and falls in love with a young French officer, whose mysterious birth, parentage, and education, are not developed, except by occasional oracular hints of Maude, till the surrender of Cornwallis, when he turns out to be the son of count D'Aubigne, and the cousin of the fair heroine. They are married; the husband succeeds to the title in good time, and the consummation of all human happiness to a young married lady, occurs in a trip to Paris. The colonel gives the lie to destiny, by being accidentally drowned; and Maude, after scolding terribly through a few pages, is found one morning stretched lifeless, on the lifeless body of her son, who had been mortally wounded at the siege of York Town.

The interest of the tale, is evidently intended by the author, to turn upon mistress Maude Mansel, who is of the highest order of mystical viragoes. She dreams dreams; she sees strange sights; she delivers oracles and prophecies; she believes in the moon; she has the strength of two Sampsons, and the tongues of

ten members of congress; she is always out at night in the rain, and seldom appears except accompanied by thunder and lightning, the inseparable attendants on ladies of her sublimity. Nobody can tell whence she comes, or what is her object in coming, except it be to scold; and nobody knows whither she vanishes, or why she departs in such a hurry. She never commits the vulgarity of walking, but always stalks, or flits away most majestically-she is here, there, and every where; she is sometimes in male, and sometimes in female attire; she deals in hints, inuendoes, mysterious threats, and diabolical anathemas; is always threatening terrible things, yet doing nothing; always plotting, to no purpose; always in a furious passion about something, and always talking in a strain, such as no human being ever talked, out of Bedlam, except in a modern historical romance. The first appearance of this mysterious mummer is thus described:

"There was a momentary suspension of speech and employment throughout the apartment, when the tall strange-looking woman stalked silently in, followed by major St. Olmar, and every eye was simultaneously turned towards her, with a strongly marked expression of surprise and curiosity. The scarlet cloak and hood, which enveloped her person, were drenched with rain, but these she flung back, revealing to those present, of whose gaze she seemed utterly regardless, a form, thin almost to emaciation, and a visage wrinkled as if with the blasts of eighty winters, though as yet it had not witnessed threescore. Her eyes alone might have appertained to a youthful face-there was something supernatural in their terrific brightness-something in their fixed and piercing gaze, that made one shrink as if from the deadly glance of the basilisk. Her dress was according to the fashion of the times-shoes fastened with ponderous buckles-a short full petticoat of drab-coloured shalloon, an open chintz gown, a lawn handkerchief pinned across her breast, with the precision which at that period marked the dress of all classes; and a cap of the same material, from beneath which strayed the tresses of her long hair, whiter and more glossy than threads of silver."

Perceiving some wounded soldiers in the apartment, she breaks out:

"There will be vengeance taken, for these gaping wounds; not one shall bleed in vain; the ravagers may slay, and flee when they have slain; but the reckoning day will come, and that ere long."

Her attention is then arrested by the appearance of major St. Olmar:

"As she looked with almost trembling earnestness upon him, her striking countenance betrayed the workings of sudden and powerful emotion; while he, though he bore her gaze in silence, felt the insufferable brightness of those strange eyes thrill through every fibre of his frame, and instinctively turned aside to avoid them. But at this juncture, she darted towards him, and holding him at arm's length, with a muscular power which he was unable to resist, she continued to read every lineament of his face, with a passionate eagerness, which he could only ascribe to a disordered intellect. Anxious to divert her attention from his person, he attempted to speak, but she vehemently interrupted him: "That eye! those brows!" she said "Young man, tell me, in God's name, who

you are?"

St. Olmar tells his name.

"St. Olmar!" she repeated, in a doubtful and less impassioned tone; and unclasping his arm, which she had held till now, she folded her arms across her

breast, and remained for a few moments musing. Then, as if a sudden recollection had darted through her mind, she hastily approached him, and laying her withered hand upon his brow, lifted the dark curls which clustered around it; and gazing for an instant upon three somewhat singular moles, which appeared high upon the right temple, pushed him from her, and covering her face with her hands, uttered a shriek so wild and piercing, that even the dying soldiers seemed startled at the sound."

St. Olmar beseeches for an explanation; but, true to the attributes of her caste, the virago, after uttering a few mysterious hints, cutting a few more capers, and frightening the dead-we beg pardon the dying soldiers, puts on the following unaccountable appearance, makes the following inexplicable speech, and as usual, stalks off with a dignity peculiar to this class of ladies:

"Her wild laugh of irony, rang through the low-arched cellar" (what a pity we have no "donjon keeps" in our country!) "as she ended, and her eyes, like living coals, shot forth a fierce, unnatural light. She looked, indeed, a very sybil; as she stood leaning against the damp gray wall, the feeble rays of the candle partially illumining her figure, and casting a still more deadly hue over her sallow countenance—her cap pushed far back from her wrinkled forehead, her gray and bushy eyebrows projecting over those unearthly orbs, her long white hair streaming upon her shoulders, and her bare and shrivelled arm stretched forth with a gesture well suited to her look and words.

"You are in a wild mood to-night, Maude, and the moon is not at its full, either" observed Edward Leslie, an old acquaintance.

"And there is that, boy, to make me wild, which you dream not of," she returned, dropping her extended arm, and standing erect as before—“Influences more potent than the fickle moon, which drives me sometimes almost to the borders of insanity. But this night-aye-this very night, I have seen that which has fired my brain, and awakened memories that I would fain have sleep for ever." Again, a few pages further on :

"Maude's eyes gleamed wildly, as she vehemently exclaimed, Why is it, do you ask! Know me but a space longer, young man, and you will never seek to learn the motives of my wayward humour. God has fathomed, and will judge them; but mortal man, save one alone, from whom I cannot hide them, shall never read the secrets of this dark and sinful heart."

And again :

"Young man," said Maude, with a menacing look, "the feeble sparrow is not more in the power of the greedy kite that bears her through the air in her talons, than thou art in mine; beware, then, how you trifle with one whose vengeance never dies unsatisfied. Once more answer me, with truth-did you know that face?"

Thus she goes on talking in high-flown hyperbole, which no one can comprehend, and acting from motives which her hearers can never fathom, until the catastrophe at the close of the second volume, when she finally explodes in the following valedictory; swallows laudanum, and dies on the body of her unfortunate son, whose situation and character afford ample proof of what the author of this work could achieve, were he content with nature and probability in constructing his fictions.

"Away, all of you!" she said, with a stern and determined look. "Away! no cast your seed upon a soil, where all that was ever good, has long since been choaked and withered by the thorns and tares of passions. Go, try your clo

quence on softer hearts! for me, I am a reprobate! Why else through life have I rejected good, and sought the paths of evil? It was my fate; and wherefore should I struggle with it? From all eternity, it was ordained that I should perish, and I am prepared to meet my doom. Now go, and leave me to wrap the winding-sheet around my son; to array once more those comely limbs, which I have often decked with a mother's pride."

The next morning, the body of Maude is found, as described in the following passage; which is quite sufficient to fill us with regret, that the writer did not oftener condescend, in the work before us, to bring down his genius to the level of human wants, of natural feelings and descriptions. The picture is striking, affecting, and moral.

"All there was quiet; and it was the dread and dreamless quiet of the last unbroken sleep. Rupert, in his grave clothes, his face covered with a napkin, and his hands crossed peacefully upon his breast, lay stretched upon the bed where he had breathed his last. It was sad to look upon that youthful form, thus early snatched from life-but there was hope and comfort in the hearts of those who mourned; for he was good and virtuous, and he had gone from a world of trial, to reap the rewards of a pure and blameless soul. But alas! for her, his wretched mother! all recoiled with horror as they beheld her, and thought upon her past life, and the terrors of her eternal destiny. She was lying on the floor; her cap had fallen off, and her white locks hung in dishevelled masses over her face and arms, partially concealing the distorted features, which still bore traces of the recent agony that had convulsed them. Beside her, lay an empty vial, labelled "laudanum," the contents of which had terminated the wicked career of one born to better fortunes. She died, as she had lived, the miserable victim of passion."

Here all is natural, and the situation, such as might, and does occur in real life. There is neither inflated description, nor inflated language--no attempt to give a disproportioned and fantastic pomposity to the simple picture of death. Yet, we are mistaken, if the reader will not bear testimony both to its pathos and sublimity, and regret that the author should have wasted his powers in the unsuccessful endeavour to imitate, what in its most successful examples, hardly deserves imitation. A departure from nature, is, we cannot help thinking, a proof either of a bad taste, or a barren genius; since it is only those who are destitute of the higher powers of invention and description, that despair of giving beauty, variety, and interest, to probable incidents and natural characters. It is a vulgar error to suppose it a proof of superior intellect, to create monsters. The fame of Shakespeare does not depend upon his Caliban; and had this been the only creation of his almost unrivalled genius, he would never have become the object of idolatry to millions of intellectual beings. The most crude and impoverished mind, is generally the most fruitful, in caricatures of passion, and outrages upon probability. A miracle is the easiest possible way of bringing about events; it requires little exercise of invention, and less of judgment. Agents beyond the sphere of nature, and subject to none of her laws, are easily managed; and actions equally beyond the reach