can express himself as fully, and even as fast, as you please; but not concisely. His ideas are heavy malleable metal, and he loves to hammer them out; his mind moves easily, but without spring, and he is a heavy hand at a joke. No one likes to call him dull, and there is a vigour in all he writes which redeems him from the charge; but tedious and intolerably self-repeating he undeniably is. This is a defect, however, which shows less in his novels than elsewhere. He is a master in the art of narration, and for the mere telling of a story, does it better and more simply than any writer we have. His style in his novels is well adapted to the level of his subject. In itself it scarcely deserves the commendation it has received. It is like the manners of a farmer at an Inn: a man of the best breeding could not be more at his ease; but it is because he submits to no artificial restraint whatever. In his works, written expressly for amusement or instruction, the plainness of his writing suits well with his plain rude way of treating his subject, and his complete insensibility to, and disregard of, any of its refinements or less obvious aspects. His shortcomings in this respect have been one great cause of the popularity these works have obtained, especially among the lesshighly cultivated classes. Every reader feels competent to say as he reads, "This is true and lifelike,”—to follow his arguments, and to comprehend his reflections. It is this which made Lamb say he was "good kitchen reading." Fielding is any thing but kitchen reading. A man must take pains with his education, and have a cultivated mind, if he intends to read Tom Jones so as to appreciate it. It has been called vulgar; it may contain vulgarities, but it is the least level to common capacities of any novel in the language; and De Foe's novels are perhaps the most so. The wonderful thing is, the wealth of the mine he lays bare at this low level, and on these universal conditions. There must be something very singular in a work which the chimney-sweep and the peer both understand and both find interesting,-which the latter at any rate admires, and the former fully enjoys. This would be an easy triumph if it were gained by an appeal to, or a description of, the common feelings; but the characteristic of De Foe is, that he has written books universally popular, whose interest is quite independent of this universal resource. His memory was a remarkable one, and he was widely and accurately informed in all those matters which a man learns by observation; and he had a signal power of gathering up that sort of information which is knowledge at first-hand, without requiring to be digested, and which is got through eye and ear rather than through books. His education had been good, but he appears simply to have mastered languages for practical use; to have accumulated the facts, not to have studied the ideas, conveyed in

them. Though a wide reader, he was never interested in other men's thoughts,-if he cites them, it is simply as authorities. When he himself thinks, it is (with rare exceptions) to direct practical issues; then he is sagacious, acute-even wise in broad every-day matters. Only in one direction did he indulge in any speculative thought, and only in this one direction did his imagination break through its ordinary matter-of-fact boundaries. He had a singular interest in the world of spirits. He wrote a History of the Devil; and it is hard to say what object he proposed to himself in this amazingly tiresome, confused, lumbering work; a strange sort of half-serious, half-burlesque attempt to track the course of the great enemy's operations, criticising "Mr. Milton's" account of his fall, counting up how many names he has in Scripture, and apologising for still calling him " plain devil;" pursuing him through Jewish history, and partly through profane; inquiring-"What may probably be the great business this black emperor has at present upon his hands, either in this world or out of it, and by what agents he works;" and finally, discussing "his last scene of liberty," and "what may be supposed to be his end." His Life of Duncan Campbell is another extraor dinary production of the same class. It professes to be the history of a famous deaf and dumb wise man, who in those days had set up as a fortune-teller in London; and seriously accounts for his powers of penetrating futurity as derived from the second-sight and intercourse with the spiritual world. What grains of truth there may be in the book as a biography, and how far it is jest or grave hoaxing, and how far serious; how much of it the author himself believed, it is impossible to tell. One can never say of De Foe, whether he was so fond of fiction he could never write unmixed truth, or so fond of exact truth as to spoil his hoaxes by making them too real. There is no joke in making people believe any thing short of what, at bottom, is a clear and palpable absurdity; and we are far from sharing in the modern astonishment, either that the public should at first have thought the famous tract on The Shortest Way with the Dissenters was written in earnest, or that both dissenters and Tories should have felt incensed against the author when it was found to be ironical. Much of it is common Tory argument and assertion, seriously and forcibly put; and the exaggeration of the conclusion scarcely, if at all, overstepped the limits of what might have proceeded from the pen of a high-flying Tory enthusiast. The whole thing had no point except as coming from a dissenter, and bore no evidence of doing so in the title-page or elsewhere. To have it written at all must have rubbed the sores of the dissenters; and to find it was written in travestie exasperated their oppressors. The History of the Apparition of

Mrs. Veal is a very circumstantial ghost-story, and now we think it a very good joke; but it was not meant as a joke, any more than the cures of bad legs we see in the advertisements of quack ointments are meant as jokes. Very likely De Foe, in his own breast, enjoyed a grave sort of chuckle at the humour of making the apparition of "a maiden gentlewoman of about thirty years of age, who for some years past had been troubled with fits," appear to Mrs. Bargrave, and recommend the perusal of Drelincourt's Book of Consolations against the Fear of Death; but he never meant the public to share his amusement. It is one of the most remarkable exhibitions ever seen of a power of giving an exact air of reality to imagined facts. Its old formal precise air, our knowledge that it was got up to sell the book to which it was prefixed, and of the extraordinary success it had, amuse us who are in the secret. But De Foe did not mean it to amuse; he meant it to convince; he deliberately intended it as an imposition, and a most successful one it proved. There are plenty more such ghost-stories scattered through De Foe's works. Take the following, with its terrific vocal conclusion, as a speci

men:

"In the year 1711, one Mrs. Stephens and her daughter were, together with Mr. Campbell, at the house of Mr. Ramells, a very great and noted weaver at Haggerstone; where the rainy weather detained them till late at night. Just after the clock struck twelve, they all of them went to the door to see if the rain had ceased, being extremely desirous to get home. As soon as ever they had opened the door and were all got together, there appeared before them a thing all in white; the face seemed of a dismal pallid hue, but the eyes thereof fiery and flaming, like beacons, and of a saucer size. It made its approaches to them, till it came up within the space of about three yards of them ; there it fixed and stood like a figure agaze for some minutes; and they all stood likewise stiff, like the figure, frozen with fear, motionless, and speechless. When all of a sudden it vanished from their eyes; and that apparition to the sight was succeeded by a noise, or the appearance of a noise, like that which is occasioned by the fighting of twenty mastiff dogs."

All we can say as to De Foe's way of regarding these and similar supernatural, or quasi-supernatural occurrences, as we choose to think them, is, that it is clear he was not prepared entirely to disbelieve; but these sort of stories, accompanied by direct strenuous assertions as to their truth in fact, and grave argument as to their bearing on unbelief, are chiefly remarkable for our present purpose as a further indication of the strange sort of confusion there seems to have been in De Foe's mind between real fact and possible fact. His imagination is so strong, that its facts seem to him of equal weight with those of memory

or knowledge; and he appears scarcely to recognise the boundary between truth and fiction. His characters, as usual, carry the tendency a step further. They lie, to suit their purposes, at every turn, and without scruple or remorse.

De Foe was a man of strong religious convictions, and there is scarcely one of his writings which does not bear the impress of his deep sense of the all-outweighing importance of a religious life; and he can even venture to affirm, in one of his vindicatory articles in his Review, that Ad Te, quacunque vocas, has been the rule of his own life. He had a strong sense of direct inspiration, even as guiding to or deterring from particular actions. Neither his genius nor his heart, however, were such as to give him any profound insight into a sense of spiritual relations. He had that sort of temperament which can feel and sympathise with sudden and violent accesses of somewhat coarse religious emotion, with too much sense and staidness on the one hand, and too much conscientiousness on the other, to make him guilty either of the unseemly excesses, or the discordant self-indulgence, which distinguish the debased forms of so-called Evangelicism. All his characters repent in the same way; they are suddenly stricken with an overwhelming sense, not so much of their guilt as of their crimes; they are appalled to think themselves outcasts from God; they lay down their evil habits generally when circumstances have removed the temptation to pursue them; repent in a summary manner, and become without difficulty sincere penitents and religious characters. He has no sense of the temptations, the trials, the difficulties with which the souls of most men find themselves surrounded after they have once left home with Bunyan's pilgrim. He knows that strait is the gate, and sharp the struggle necessary to pass it; but he always seems to forget that narrow is the way even after the gate is passed.

We have strict conventional rules in England as to what are to be considered readable books for society at large. It is scarcely necessary to say, that De Foe's novels are quite outside this pale. It is not that they were written with the least idea either of pandering to a vicious nature, or shocking an innocent one; but they deal frankly with matters about which our better modern taste is silent, and use language which shocks modern refinement.

It is only fair, however, to say, they are in their essence wholesome, decent, and, above all, cleanly. They have neither the varnished prurience of Richardson, the disgusting filth of Swift, nor the somewhat too indulgent and sympathising warmth of Fielding; they are plain-spoken and gross, but that is the worst of them; and though the obvious and hammered moralities of the author seem valueless enough, it is to be remembered

that the class whose rudeness would make it impervious to injury from the absence of delicacy in these works, is just the one in a position to profit by their rough and primitive teaching. For those who seek it, they contain a deeper moral, not the less important because the writer was unconscious of its existence. They are warnings against the too common error of confounding crime and sin. They are the histories of criminals, who remind us at every page that they are human beings just like ourselves; that the forms of sin are often the result merely of circumstances; and that the aberration of the will, not the injury done to society, is the measure of a man's sinfulness. They show us among thieves and harlots the very same struggles against new temptations, the same slow declension and self-enfeebling wiles, which we have to experience and contend against in ourselves. We are too apt to think of the criminal outcasts of society as of persons removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and given up to a reprobate condition totally different from our own. One day we shall probably be surprised to find that, while right and wrong continue to differ infinitely, the various degrees of human sinfulness lie within much narrower limits than we, who measure by the external act, are at all accustomed to conceive. De Foe is a great teacher of charity; he always paints the remaining good with the growing evil, and never dares to show the most degraded and abandoned of his wretches as beyond the pale of repentance, or unattended by the merciful providences of God;" nay, he can never bear to quit them at last, except in tears and penitence and in the entrance-gate at least of reconciliation.

ART. VI.-ITALY.

Correspondence with Sardinia respecting the State of Affairs in Italy; presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 1856.

History of Piedmont. By Antonio Gallenga. London, Chapman and Hall.

The Subalpine Kingdom. By Bayle St. John. Same Publishers. A FULLY developed conscience is an awful and perilous blessing; and if the time of its highest sensitiveness arrives prematurely, the ultimate form of the character is likely to be prejudiced rather than benefited. It is better that some rough work should be got through in boyhood, before scruples are weighed and constant moral thoughtfulness exercised. Instinct has its place; and