evinces the feebleness with which he conceives. If his personages were real to his own heart or imagination, if they were any thing more than clothed ideas and passions, we doubt if he would part with them so easily, or kill them with such nonchalance. His hero, of course, is preserved amidst the general slaughter, but not without many wounds both of the body and spirit.

We have heard the style of Mr. James praised, but on what principle of taste we could never discover. To us it seems but ill adapted to narrative. It has little flow and perspicuity, and no variety. It is usually heavy, lumbering, and monotonous. His sentences seem constructed painfully, yet doggedly, and not to spring spontaneously from his brain, inspired by the thought or feeling they are intended to convey. Half of the words seem in the way of the idea, and the latter appears not to have strength enough to clear the passage. Occasionally, a short, sharp sentence comes, like a flash of lightning, from the cloud of his verbiage, and relieves the twilight of his diction; but generally, the reader must plod laboriously through one of his volumes, and, if he can overlook the style in the incidents, it is all the better for his patience. James has none of that wonderful power of clear narration, which we observe in Scott; that ductile style, which changes with each change in the story, and seems insensibly to mould itself into the shape of the thought and emotion which are uppermost at the time. Nor has he any of that quiet, demure humor, which Scott often infuses into the very heart of his diction, as in the first hundred pages of "Redgauntlet." There is a strait-laced gravity in Mr. James's manner, which is often ridiculous, because wholly inappropriate. In all those higher qualities of style, which do not relate to the mere rhetorical arrangement of words and sentences, but spring directly from passion, fancy, or imagi

nation, and bear the impress of the writer's nature, he is very deficient. There are but few felicitous passages in his manifold volumes. He has hardly any of those happy combinations of words, which stick fast to the memory, and do more than pages to express the author's meaning. With all his command of a certain kind of elegant language, he has little command of expression. His imagination, as a shaping power, has either no existence, or he writes too rapidly to allow it time to perform its office. His imagery is common; and his manner of arraying a trite figure in a rich suit of verbiage only makes its essential commonness and poverty more evident. His style is not dotted over with any of those shining points, either of imagery or epigram, which illumine works of less popularity and pretension. To us his temperament seems sluggish, and is only kindled into energy by the most fiery stimulants. "A slow, rolling grandiloquence" seems his rhetorical ideal, and he does not always succeed in attaining even that humble height of expression. As his object, however, seems to be to fill out three volumes with a narration of incidents which will please, rather than to cultivate any of those qualities of condensation and picturesqueness which would compress them into one, we may not be justified in interfering between him and his bookseller.

In these remarks, we do not intend to say, that our novelist has no passages which clash with this opinion of his style. It would be a monstrous supposition, that a human being could possibly write a hundred volumes, without being betrayed at times into eloquence and beauty of expression. We refer, in our strictures, to general traits, not to individual exceptions; to the desert, and not to the oases in it. Mr. James evidently possesses talent sufficiently great to enable him to write well, if he could only learn to "labor and to wait;" but he is cursed with the mania of book-making, and

seems to look more to the number of his pages than to the quality of his rhetoric.

In these remarks on Mr. James, as a novelist, we have intended to do him no injustice. We are willing to grant him the praise of talents and learning, and to do fit honor to the moral purpose he seems to have in his writings. But we dispute his claim to those qualities which constitute the chief excellence of a novelist; we doubt his possession of that fecundity of mind, which can produce a series of novels without constant repetition of old types of character, and old machinery of plot. If the severity of our criticism has ever run into fanciful exaggeration, it has been owing to the petulant humor engendered by exposing unfounded pretension.

Indeed, Mr. James does not appear like a man who could be wounded or hurt by severe criticism. The abstract character of the personages of his novels affects our own view of himself. We oppose him as we would oppose an idea or a principle. We do not consider him as an individual. Our imagination refuses to shape the idea suggested by his name into a palpable person. Whenever an author appears to our mind in a concrete form, the quality of mercy we extend to his compositions is never "strained." We feel for his pardonable vanity, and we would launch at him no sarcasm cal. culated to lacerate his delicate sensibilities. He is a human being, a brother, or, at least, a cousin. If he be a dunce, we pat him on the shoulder, and tell him to try again. If he be a man of talents, with some absurd or pernicious principles, we regret that the latter should weaken the respect we bear to the former. But not so is it with Mr. James. We no more think of hurting his feelings by sharp criticism, than of wounding the sensibility of Babbage's calculating machine

by detecting it in a mathematical error.

To us he is a thin essence, impenetrable to the weapons of earthly combat, and unmoved by any hail-storm of satire which might seem to beat on his frame. He is an abstraction, and, therefore, the last person to expect, that a reviewer will hide the thorns of analysis in the flowers of panegyric.

SYDNEY SMITH.*

FEW persons on either side of the Atlantic are ignorant of the name of the Rev. Sydney Smith, the wit, the whig, the Edinburgh reviewer, and the holder of Pennsylvania bonds. But if we except his lately published "Letters on American Debts," his name is more familiar than his writings. It is not a matter of surprise, that the brilliant petulance and grotesque severity of the "Letters" did not win him many admirers in the United States. The fact, that they insulted our national pride, and were unjust and sweeping in their censures, was sufficient to prevent their singular merit, as compositions, from being acknowledged. After having withstood all the falsehood and exaggeration of the London press, a press which, in the sturdy impudence with which it retains its hold upon a lie, excels all others in the world,— we felt irritated, that a 66 pleasant man had come out against us," with the expectation that we were to be "laid low by a joker of jokes." A more thorough knowledge of Smith's writings, and a perception of the ingrained peculiarities of his character, would, we think, abate much of the grim asperity with which we received that specimen of his nimble wit and sarcastic rebukes. If we knew the man,

* The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. volumes. London: Longmans & Co. 8vo. Review, July, 1844.

Second edition. In three

1840.—North American