'Well, well; all that may be,' replied Targe a little peevishly; 'but let me tell you one thing, Mr Buchanan, if he could have swopt* one-half of his genius for a little more honesty, he would have made an advantageous exchange, although he had thrown all his Latin into the bargain.'

'In what did he ever show any want of honesty? said Buchanan.

"In calumniating and endeavouring to blacken the reputation of his rightful sovereign, Mary Queen of Scots,' replied Targe, the most beautiful and accomplished princess that ever sat on a throne.'

'I have nothing to say either against her beauty or her accomplishments,' resumed Buchanan; but surely, Mr Targe, you must acknowledge that she was

?'

'Have a care what you say, sir!' interrupted Targe; 'I'll permit no man that ever wore breeches to speak disrespectfully of that unfortunate queen!'

'No man that ever wore either breeches or a philabeg,' replied Buchanan, shall prevent me from speaking the truth when I see occasion!'

'Speak as much truth as you please, sir,' rejoined Targe; but I declare that no man shall calumniate the memory of that beautiful and unfortunate princess in my presence while I can wield a claymore.'

'If you should wield fifty claymores, you cannot deny that she was a Papist!' said Buchanan.

'Well, sir,' cried Targe, what then? She was, like other people, of the religion in which she was bred.'

'I do not know where you may have been bred, Mr Targe,' said Buchanan; for aught I know, you may be an adherent to the worship of the scarlet lady yourself. Unless that is the case, you ought not to interest yourself in the reputation of Mary Queen of Scots.'

'I fear you are too nearly related to the false slanderer whose name you bear!' said Targe.

"I glory in the name; and should think myself greatly obliged to any man who could prove my relation to the great George Buchanan!' cried the other.

·

'He was nothing but a disloyal calumniator,' cried Targe; who attempted to support falsehoods by forgeries, which, I thank Heaven, are now fully detected!'

"You are thankful for a very small mercy,' resumed Buchanan; but since you provoke me to it, I will tell you, in plain English, that your bonny Queen Mary was the strumpet of Bothwell and the murderer of her husband!'

No sooner had he uttered the last sentence, than Targe flew at him like a tiger, and they were separated with difficulty by Mr N's groom, who was in the adjoining chamber, and had heard the altercation.

I insist on your giving me satisfaction, or retracting what you have said against the beautiful Queen of Scotland!' cried Targe.

The groom interposed, and endeavoured to reconcile the two enraged Scots, but without success. Buchanan soon arrived with his sword, and they retired to a private spot in the garden. The groom next tried to persuade them to decide their difference by fair boxing. This was rejected by both the champions as a mode of fighting unbecoming gentlemen. The groom asserted that the best gentlemen in England sometimes fought in that manner, and gave, as an instance, a boxing match, of which he himself had been a wit ness, between Lord G.'s gentleman and a gentleman. farmer at York races about the price of a mare.

6

But our quarrel,' said Targe, 'is about the reputation of a queen.'

That, for certain,' replied the groom, makes a difference.'

Buchanan unsheathed his sword.

Are you ready, sir?' cried Targe. "That I am. Come on, sir,' said Buchanan; 'and the Lord be with the righteous.'

'Amen!' cried Targe; and the conflict began.

Both the combatants understood the weapon they fought with; and each parried his adversary's blows with such dexterity, that no blood was shed for some time. At length Targe, making a feint at Buchanan's head, gave him suddenly a severe wound in the thigh.

I hope you are now sensible of your error?' said Targe, dropping his point.

I am of the same opinion I was!' cried Buchanan; so keep your guard.' So saying, he advanced more briskly than ever upon Targe, who, after warding off several strokes, wounded his antagonist a second time. Buchanan, however, showed no disposition to relinquish the combat. But this second wound being in the forehead, and the blood flowing with profusion into his eyes, he could no longer see distinctly, but was obliged to flourish his sword at random, without being able to perceive the movements of his adversary, who, closing with him, became master of his sword, and with the same effort threw him to the ground; and, standing over him, he said, 'This may convince you, Mr Buchanan, that yours is not the righteous cause! You are in my power; but I will act as the queen whose character I defend would order were she alive. I hope you will live to repent of the injustice you have done to that amiable and unfortunate princess.' He then assisted Buchanan to rise. Buchanan made no immediate answer: but when he saw Targe assisting the groom to stop the blood which flowed from his wounds, he said, I must acknowledge, Mr Targe, that you behave like a gentleman.'

After the bleeding was in some degree diminished by the dry lint which the groom, who was an excellent farrier, applied to the wounds, they assisted him to his chamber, and then the groom rode away to inform Mr N of what had happened. But the wound becoming more painful, Targe proposed sending for a surgeon. Buchanan then said that the surgeon's mate belonging to one of the ships of the British As for retracting what I have said,' replied Bucha-squadron then in the bay was, he believed, on shore, nan, that is no habit of mine; but, with regard to giving you satisfaction, I am ready for that to the best of my ability; for let me tell you, sir, though I am not a Highlandman, I am a Scotchman as well as yourself, and not entirely ignorant of the use of the claymore; so name your hour, and I will meet you tomorrow morning.'

'Why not directly?' cried Targe; there is nobody in the garden to interrupt us.'

and as he was a Scotchman, he would like to employ him rather than a foreigner. Having mentioned where he lodged, one of Mr N's footmen went immediately for him. He returned soon after, saying that the surgeon's mate was not at his lodging, nor expected for some hours. But I will go and bring the French surgeon,' continued the footnian.

'I thank you, Mr Thomas,' said Buchanan; 'but I will have patience till my own countryman returns.' He may not return for a long time,' said Themas.

'I should have chosen to have settled some things first; but since you are in such a hurry, I will notYou had best let me run for the French surgeon, baulk you. I will step home for my sword and be with you directly,' said Buchanan.

who, they say, has a great deal of skill.'

I am obliged to you, Mr Thomas,' added Buchanan; 'but neither Frenchman nor Spanishman shall dress

To swop is an old English word still used in Scotland, my wounds when a Scottishman is to be found for signifying to exchange.

love or money.'

hidden from the cheerful light of the sun, poor Agnes was doomed to toil from morning till night, subjected to the command of a dissatisfied mistress, who, not estimating as she ought the misery incurred by serving her, constantly threatened her servants with a dismission, at which the unthinking wretches would tremble merely from the sound of the words; for to have reflected-to have considered what their purport was-to be released from a dungeon, relieved from continual upbraidings and vile drudgery, must have been a subject of rejoicing; and yet, because these good tidings were delivered as a menace, custom had made the hearer fearful of the consequence. So, death being described to children as a disaster, even poverty and shame will start from it with affright; whereas, had it been pictured with its benign aspect, it would have been feared but by few, and many, many would welcome it with gladness.'

CHARLOTTE SMITH.

The Sicilian Romance attracted attention by i's romantic and numerous adventures, and the copies descriptions of scenery it contained. These wire depicted with the glow and richness of a poetical fancy. Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and eve Walpole,' says Sir Walter Scott, though writing upon an imaginative subject, are decidedly prose authors. Mrs Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction; that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemed essential to poetry.'* Actual rhythm was also at the command of the accomplished authoress. She has interspersed various copies of verses throughout her works, but they are less truly poetical than her prose. They have great sameness of style and diction, and are often tedious, because introduced in scenes already too protracted with_description or sentiment. Ia 1791 appeared The Romance of the Forest, exhibiting the powers of the novelist in full maturity. To her wonderful talent in producing scenes of mystery and surprise, aided by external phenomena aad striking description, she now added the powerfal The novels of MRS CHARLOTTE SMITH were of a delineation of passion. Her painting of the charac more romantic cast than those of Miss Burney: they ter of La Motte, hurried on by an evil counseller, aimed more at delineating affections than manners, amidst broken resolutions and efforts at recall to and they all evinced superior merit. The first, the most dark and deliberate guilt and cruelty, apEmmeline, published in 1788, had an extensive sale. proaches in some respects to the genius of Godwin. Ethelinde (1789), and Celestina (1791), were also re- Variety of character, however, was not the forte of ceived with favour and approbation. Her best is Mrs Radcliffe. Her strength lay in the invention the Old English Manor-House, in which her descrip- and interest of her narrative. Like the great painter tive powers are found united to an interesting plot with whom she has been compared, she loved to and well-sustained dramatis persona. The haste sport with the romantic and the terrible-with the with which this lady produced her works, and her striking imagery of the mountain-forest and the unfortunate domestic circumstances, led her often lake-the obscure solitude-the cloud and the storm to be defective in arrangement and exaggerated in -wild banditti-ruined castles-and with those style and colouring. She took a peculiar pleasure half-discovered glimpses or visionary shadows of in caricaturing lawyers, having herself suffered the invisible world which seem at times to cross our deeply from the 'law's delay;' and as her husband path, and which still haunt and thrill the imaginahad ruined himself and family by foolish schemes tion. This peculiar faculty was more strongly evinced and projects, she is supposed to have drawn him in in Mrs Radcliffe's next romance, The Mysteries of the projector who hoped to make a fortune by Udolpho, published in 1794, which was the most manuring his estate with old wigs! Sir Walter popular of her performances, and is justly considered Scott, in acknowledgment of many pleasant hours her best. Mrs Barbauld seems to prefer the Roderived from the perusal of Mrs Smith's works,' in-mance of the Forest,' as more complete in character cluded her in his British Novelists, and prefixed an interesting criticism and memoir. He alludes to her defective narratives or plots, but considers her characters to be conceived with truth and force, though none bear the stamp of actual novelty. He adds, she is uniformly happy in supplying them with language fitted to their station in life; nor are there many dialogues to be found which are at once so entertaining, and approach so nearly to truth and reality.'

ANN RADCLIFFE.

and story; but in this opinion few will concur: it wants the sublimity and boldness of the later work. The interest, as Scott remarks, 'is of a more agitating and tremendous nature, the scenery of a wilder and more terrific description, the characters distirguished by fiercer and more gigantic features. Montoni, a lofty-souled desperado and captain et condottieri, stands beside La Motte and his marquis, like one of Milton's fiends beside a witch's familiar. Adeline is confined within a ruined manor-house. but her sister heroine, Emily, is imprisoned in a huge castle like those of feudal times; the one is attacked and defended by bands of armed banditti, MRS ANN RADCLIFFE (who may be denominated the other only threatened by constables and thiefthe Salvator Rosa of British novelists) was born in takers. The scale of the landscape is equally dide London, of respectable parents, on the 9th of July rent; the quiet and limited woodland scenery of the 1764. Her maiden name was Ward. In her twenty-one work forming a contrast with the splendid and third year she married Mr William Radcliffe, a student of law, but who afterwards became the editor and proprietor of a weekly paper, the English Chronicle. Two years after her marriage, in 1789, Mrs Radcliffe published her first novel, The Custles of Athlin and Dunbayne, the scene of which she laid in Scotland during the remote and warlike times of the feudal barons. This work gave but little indication of the power and fascination which the authoress afterwards evinced. She had made no attempt to portray national manners or historical events (in which, indeed, she never excelled), and the plot was wild and unnatural. Her next effort, made in the following year, was more successful,

high-wrought descriptions of Italian mountain grandeur which occur in the other.' This parallel apples very strikingly to the critic's own poems, the Lay and Marmion. The latter, like Mrs Radcliffe's second novel, has blemishes of construction and style from which the first is free; but it has the breadth

and does not even John Bunyan demand a share of it? In *This honour more properly belongs to Sir Phily Sidney: Smollett's novels there are many poetical conceptions and de

scriptions. Indeed on this point Sir Walter partly contradets himself, for he elsewhere states that Smollett expended in his novels many of the ingredients both of grave and humans as poetry. Mrs Radcliffe gave a greater prominence to portical description than any of her predecessors.

of this lady's novels abound in pictures and situations as striking and as well grouped as those of the artist and melo-dramatist. The latter years of Mrs Radcliffe were spent in retirement, partly induced by ill health. She had for a long period been afflicted with spasmodic asthma, and an attack proved fatal to her on the 7th of February 1823. She died in London, and was interred in a vault of the chapelof ease at Bayswater, belonging to St George's, Hanover Square.

The success which crowned Mrs Radcliffe's romances led several writers to copy her peculiar manner, but none approached to the original either in art or genius. She eclipsed all her imitators and contemporaries in exciting emotions of surprise, awe, and terror, and in constructing a story which should carry the reader forward with undiminished anxiety to its close. She dwelt always in the regions of romance. She does not seem ever to have attempted humour or familiar narrative, and there is little of real character or natural incident in her works. The style of which she may be considered the founder is powerfully attractive, and few are able to resist the fascinations of her narrative, but that style is obviously a secondary one. To delineate character in the many-coloured changes of life, to invent natural, lively, and witty dialogues and situations, and to combine the whole, as in Tom Jones, in a regular progressive story, complete in all its parts, is a greater intellectual effort than to construct a romantic plot where the author is not confined to probability or to the manners and institutions of any particular time or country. When Scott transports us back to the days of chivalry and the crusades, we feel that he is embodying history, animating its records with his powerful imagination, and introducing us to actual scenes and persons such as once existed. His portraits are not of one, but of various classes. There is none of this reality about Mrs Radcliffe's creations. Her scenes of mystery and gloom will not bear the light of sober investigation. Deeply as they affect the imagination at the time, after they have been once unfolded before the reader, they break up like dreams in his recollection. The remembrance of them is confused, though pleasant, and we have no desire to return to what enchanted us, unless it be for some passages of pure description. The want of moral interest and of character and dialogue, natural and truthful, is the cause of this evanescence of feeling. When the story is unravelled, the great charm is over-the talisman ceases to operate when we know the materials of which it is composed.

Every feature in the surrounding landscape or objects described--every subordinate circumstance in the scene, however minute, is so disposed as to deeper the impression and keep alive curiosity. This prelude, as Mrs Barbauld has remarked, like the tuning of an instrument by a skilful hand, has the effect of producing at once in the mind a tone of feeling correspondent to the future story. No writer has excelled, and few have approached, Mrs Radcliffe in this peculiar province. A higher genius, however, would have boldly seized upoa supernatural agency as a proper element of romance. There are feelings and superstitions lurking in every breast which would have responded to such au appeal; and while we have the weird sisters of Macbeth, and the unburied majesty of Denmark, all must acknowledge the adaptation of such ma chinery to produce the greatest effects of which human genius is capable. The ultimate explana tions of Mrs Radcliffe certainly give a littleness to the preliminary incidents which affected us so powerfully while they were dim and obscure and full of mystery. It is as if some theatrical artist were to display to his audience the coarse and mean materials by which his brilliant stage effects were produced, instead of leaving undisturbed the strong impressions they have produced on the imagination. Apart, however, from this defect-which applies only to the interest of the plot or narrative-the situations and descriptions of Mrs Radcliffe are in the highest degree striking and perfect. She had never been in Italy when she wrote the Mysteries of Udolpho,' yet her paintings of Italian scenery, and of the mountains of Switzerland, are conceived with equal truth and richness of colouring. And what poet or painter has ever surpassed (Byron has imitated) her account of the first view of Venice, as seen by her heroine Emily, with its islets, palaces, and terraces rising out of the sea; and as they glided on, the grander features of the city appearing more distinctly-its terraces crowned with airy yet majestic fabrics, touched with the splendour of the setting sun, appearing as if they had been called up from the ocean by the wand of an enchanter rather than reared by human hands.' Her pictures are innumerable, and they are always introduced with striking effect. 'Set off,' says a judicious critic, against the calm beauty of a summer evening, or the magnificent gloom of a thunder-storm, her pastoral or banditti groups stand out with double effect; while to the charge of vagueness of description, it may be answered that Mrs Radcliffe is by no means vague where distinctness of imagery Mrs Radcliffe restricted her genius by an arbi- is or ought to be her object, as any one may trary rule of composition. She made the whole of satisfy himself who recalls to his recollection her her mysterious circumstances resolve into natural description of the lonely house by the Mediterracauses. The seemingly supernatural agencies are nean, with the scudding clouds, the screaming seaexplained to be palpable and real: every mystery birds, and the stormy sea, the scene selected for the is cleared up, and often by means very trifling or murder of Ellena; or another picture, in the best disproportioned to the end. In order to raise manner of Salvator, of the first glimpse of the castle strong emotions of fear and horror in the body of of Udolpho, rising over a mountain pass, with the the work, the author is tempted to go lengths, to slant sunbeams lighting up its ancient weatheraccount for which the subsequent explanations seem beaten towers. Indeed the whole description of utterly inadequate. Thus, for example, after all the that Apennine fastness, both without and within, is wonder and dismay, and terror and expectation ex- in the best style, not of literal, indeed, but of ima cited by the mysterious chamber in the castle of ginative painting-"fate sits on those dark battle Udolpho, how much are we disappointed and dis-ments and frowns:" the very intricacy of its internai gusted to find that all this pother has been raised by a waxen statue!"* In one sense this restriction increases our admiration of the writer, as evincing, in general, the marvellous ingenuity with which she prepares, invents, and arranges the incidents for immediate effect as well as subsequent explanation.

*Dunlop's History of Fiction.

architecture and its endless passages-a mighty maze, and, we fear, without a plan-only serve to deepen the impression of imprisonment, and be wilderment, and gloom. The romantic colouring which Mrs Radcliffe could throw over actual objects, at the same time preserving their symmetry and appearance entire, is finely displayed in ner English descriptions, particularly in that of Windsor.

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