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single instant, happened, as we wrote the last word, to stare us in the face, says, "We can promise our readers that they never read anything like it before," which is adding the opinion of one unsafe man to that of a good many honest people.

A certain personal phase, not a pleasant one, is assumed and carried through it with great power. But this phase must have been conscious to the writer. He must have been designedly original. He must have set to his work with some such feeling towards the world, as he would probably think well expressed by the words, "There! take that, and see how like it!"

mate which they allow us to make of their whole characters. A work of fiction is but the manifestation of its author's self. In books, as well as in life, character is the great criterion. And we have a right, certainly in the case of an anonymous author, to express freely opinions resulting from a fair application of it. With all one's disposition to fortify himself with reasons, in judging of a work of fiction, we inevitably come back to the first question, "How does this affect us?" All our candid examination of its merits only serves to analyze the impression with which we laid it down. For it is that alone, the color of the soul that shines through it, No truly great artist ever desired to which really operates upon the reader. place himself before the world in that at- He may be interested in the story, may see titude. The pride of genuine nobleness is its faults and excellencies of style, may more humble. It does not condescend to yield to its power, and still at the end he don the motley and please the general with may feel a relief. There may have been fantastic tricks. In a word, that originality qualities of the author's character, as which is conscious to the writer, is not genu- shown through his pages, to which he ine, and it is soon found out and disliked. does not take. He may be uneasily imHerein we fear that the author of Wuther-pressed by him:-just as when, in traving Heights has some unsound timbers in him; the critical underwriters, to use a mercantile figure, cannot insure him as A. No. 1. He may make fortunate voyages hereafter, but the chances are against

you

him.

All that is really great and good in this book, might have been given in a better style, without its revolting pictures. Indeed, the writer might have been personal and peculiar, and melancholy even, if he had so pleased, provided his greatest solicitude had been to please the reader. As it is, admirable as is his power, he must be ranked not among the first writers of fiction. His book has the air rather of an exposé of his life-suffering, to use a Germanism, than a purely ideal composition. The world will not long be pleased with one who treats it with so much intentional rudeness; it is an extremely sensitive creature, and there are none it cuts the acquaintance of sooner than those who take pains to be in favor with it, by letting out that they despise it.

It seems when we have got through all that can be said of a writer's style, thought, power, and all qualities appertaining to literary work, that in the end, the great test by which writers must be tried, is not their excellence in particulars, but the esti

elling, you sit down to the tavern dinner, and there comes a man with a thin mean

nose, and plants himself at your side; you speak of the day and the route; all is very well, except the je ne sais quoi, which makes you glad when he takes himself away; nothing was said beyond a few common sentences, and yet the man disgusts you. You have no particular dislike of him, yet you do not desire him to be by; you feel that you could say to him with Dogberry, "I wish your worship well; God restore you to health; and if a merry meeting may be wished, God probibit it. Just so the reader may be impressed after finishing a novel.

We believe that the world requires of an author some evidence of moral health, as well as mental power. It must feel the gentleman in a writer; the kind heart, the upright meaning, the high-mindedness, from which a deep religious feeling is almost inseparable. It does not exact "the ponderous gravity of a didactic purpose;" it is sufficient if it can be secure that it is in the society of a man of decent manners, and honest and benevolent intentions.

If we are legitimately impressed by Wuthering Heights, it will not in this respect answer so universally the requirements of the public as any of the novels of

Scott-because it does not bring us into | contact with so agreeable a character. We instance Scott, here and above, for the reason that every reader ought to know and love him; many other names among our best novelists would equally suffice for the comparison. With Scott we feel in the society of a gentleman, a man of courage and uprightness, a pleasant travelling companion; it is, in fact, a certain remedy for nervous depression to run through one of his familiar stories-improving to bodily health as well as conducive to mental se

renity. The effect of his letters is yet more invigorating. He seems to have lived, with all his troubles, in a region of perpetual sunrise, and, as we read him, there breathes upon us the air of morning.

The author of Wuthering Heights is not so happily compounded. He has a peculiar obtrusive conceit about him which makes one nervous lest he commit some new gaucherie. So many of his fine passages are marred by affectation that there is an uncomfortable struggle in the mind whether to yield a too easy confidence, or be altogether disgusted. Yet the strength of his will prevails; though we would, we cannot shake him off. He is like a friend who continually annoys you with a want of tact, which is so obvious you are never sure it is not pure affectation. If you accompany this friend, for example, down Broadway, he will be suddenly smitten with the beauty of some child, and will stop and enter into conversation with it, utterly regardless of the natural astonishment of its mamma; thus forcing you to blush for him and drag him away. If you walk with him in the fields, on Staten Island, or elsewhere, he will find some huge terrapin, or boaconstrictor, and insist on bringing home on his arm, leaving you exposed to the jeers of the populace,

while he marches on sublimely insensible. He does not remember the prices of the commonest articles of purchase. But most of all he makes himself disagreeable in a book-store; he appears to consider the clerks who officiate there to be so many Admirable Crichtons, and opens his recondite reading to them, while they stare at you grinningly, as who, should say, "Art thou also green as he is?"

Moreover, this friend to whom the author of Wuthering Heights must be likened is continually "embroiling himself with women." He dissects to you their characters and finds out motives for them which they never dreamed of. He fancies he understands them perfectly, all the while you are quite sure he is mistaken. In his intercourse with them he sets out with a firm belief in his own infallibility, and makes all after developments conform to that hypothesis. The consequence is, he has met with some rebuffs that have soured his temper and thrown a shadow over him; yet he has lost none of his original faith in himself. Why he should have been so unsuccessful is a mystery, for his figure was well enough, and his conversation, though by no means that of one accustomed to the best society, was yet fresh and fascinating. But he looks upon women as a refined sort of men, and they therefore are unable to give him their confidence.

Suppose such an impracticable man of talent to give the world a novel; he would make one very much resembling in spirit this which lies before us. We might conclude a review of such a novel, with heartily thanking him for all that was good in it and expressing the hope that his next production might be less marred by serious faults and errors.

G. W. P.

ATHENIAN BANQUETS.

BANQUET THIRD.*

J.D. Whelpley

EXRLY in the evening of the appointed | day, her auditors were assembled, when Diotima entered the banquet room, followed by Euripides the tragic poet, and Meton the parasite. Meton placed himself opposite to Cymon on the left; Socrates and Euripides on the right and left, in the middle places; and Lysis below Euripides, on the left. Thus it happened, that Socrates and Cymon were together on the right of Diotima, as on the former occasions.

When the guests had fully answered the first call of hunger and the wine was brought in, which they drank not raw, but diluted, and in moderate cups, the entertainer, when a silence was made, continued her story, as follows:

"The city of Babylon lies on both sides the Euphrates. The river, bending like a serpent, creeps under the mountainous wall on the northern side, and escapes through it at the south. Within the inclosures of the walls,-which are banks of sun-baked clay, piled to the height of the Acropolis, and inclosing the region of Babylon like a belt of barren hills,-gardens watered by canals, orchards bearing apples of Persia, whose seed is like a stone, fields rich with the third harvest of the year, and a population, frugal, peaceable and full of ingenious industry, are at once presented to your eyes; as if the scattered villages of a well-governed kingdom had been swept together in a mass.

"Our caravan entered the city through a defile or breach in the wall, defended by gates of brass thirty cubits in height. From the place of entrance to our caravanserai near the southern wall was a day's journey; and had it not been for the regularity of the roads, the splendor and frequency of the mansions of Persian nobles, and the crowds of horsemen, foot

passengers and chariots, moving in all the ways, we should have fancied ourselves traversing an open region, and not within the walls of a city. For here the houses were not crowded together as in Athens, but stood each apart, in the midst of a park; and about them the huts of weavers and handicraftsmen were scattered numerously everywhere among the gardens.

"While we passed slowly over the roads and spaces of the city, wondering at the multitude of the people, for if we had counted them it must have been by thousands at once,-I gathered many particulars from my master touching the history of the city and of the builders of its walls. Some say, and these are the Magi, that the first Babylonians came from Bactria, and began to build the great tower of Belus which rises like a ruinous hill in the southwest angle of the city. They wished to raise it in honor of the Sun and of their ancestors. This was at a period in remote antiquity, when the stars held not the places they now hold, and the race of men were long-lived and of gigantic stature. When the first Babylonians came to the Euphrates, they found the land without inhabitants; but when they began to dig canals and plant gardens, and grew wealthy, and their numbers increased, the barbarians of the north came down upon them, and robbed and spoiled tm. Then their prince made a decree, that a wall should be built about the whole region, and that every man should contribute to the work: and in a few years they finished the inner wall. But, as it happened in Egypt, the custom of building for their kings and princes once established in the memory of the Babylonians, care was taken that it should not fall into desuetude. The outer wall, a work of four years of man's life, the hanging gardens of Semiramis,

* For the second Banquet, see number of this journal for November, 1846;-and for the first, see the number for February, of the present year.

He may

and the great temples, beside a multitude | he is neither a story-teller, a moralizer, nor of palaces, comparable only with those of an epigrammatist; a sophist nor a maker Egypt, for extent and magnificence, were of pathetic pictures. Much less is he a thus gradually builded in the course of dramatist, like Euripides, or a master of many centuries; but the true periods of social opinions, like Diotima. their beginning and completion, are known smack of all these, but the business of a only to the Magi who keep the records of historian, I think, is with events, and the the tower of Belus. When the Chaldeans, acts of cities, as they are moved by their a people of the north, descended upon common desires, fears and aspirations." Mesopotamia and took Babylon, they caused the outer wall to be restored and heightened; but since the Persians have the empire, the princes oppress the people, and neglect their walls.

"Imagine a nation of weavers and handicraftsmen employed in every species of manufacture, living under a tyranny which forbids the possibility of honest riches, and you have pictured to yourselves the population of Babylon. Their manufactures are taken down the Euphrates and carried by Phoenician mariners to all parts of the world. By caravans the stuffs and products of Babylon are distributed over Asia, Bactria, and the north. By these means a perpetual stream of every kind of riches is poured back by commerce into the city, enriching the masters who govern it, but not the multitude who are their In Babylon, as in Egypt, the

people are slaves."

When Diotima came to this point in her story, Euripides, who leaned upon his left side with his eyes declined, and listening attentively, looked up at the narrator with a smile, and made a movement to speak. Diotima perceiving it, paused instantly, and waited for what he would say.

"I think," said he, " you would write a good history if you chose to undertake it." "I think so too," echoed Lysis: "Diotima's narrative is very agreeable."

"I will venture to contradict you both," said Socrates. "I do not think it lies in Diotima's power to make a good history."

Euripides, a polité man, and ambitious withal, who would rather flatter than offend, though he knew Socrates well, could not conceal his surprise at the seeming rudeness of his remark. "Your reason, friend," said he; "your profound reason," "She gives us pictures, descriptions, conversations, and no history; your historian, to my understanding, is he who bears you strongly along on a stream of events;

"You are over nice with distinctions, Socrates," replied the other; "and here seems to be one made without a difference: nor did I ever hear you so positive about a trifle. If I describe a city, why not as well the acts of the city: if the deeds of one man, why not the deeds of many men?"

"When you," replied Socrates, "excite our pity with the griefs of Alcestis, consigning herself to death for love's sake, you move us with a private sorrow, and we are mingled in sympathy with the affection of a wife and husband; beyond this you look for no effect. Homer also shows us Achilles in his tent, mourning for Patroclus, or pictures the tender parting of Hector with his wife and child; but these are only the ornaments of the work, the foliage of the column. The individuals are swept along in the torrent of destiny; one by one they rise, triumph for an instant, and are lost forever; but still the action moves on and the war is never at an end. But when Orestes enters upon the stage, it is Orestes and not a nation, or a history, that interests us. Therefore, I argue, Diotima is not a historian by nature; her descriptions are of individuals, of passions, of entertainments, and always of the quiet and the easily representable; but to me Homer seems to be the inventor of history, because he first subordinated the persons to the action. To describe the virtue of a hero, or of an entire city contending and bearing up against a common calamity, be it of war, of the inroads of the ocean, or of pestilence, or violence from abroad, or of vice and injury in the city,-in short, of all those sorrows which the gods inflict upon nations and races of men,-this seems to me history; and if it be done as Homer does it, from the heart, tempering all with love, with heroic courage, the interest of the event, and the hope of fame, it is epical, as I think, and needs to be written in verse. For, as the whispers of lovers

are always musical if they be true, and the curses of enemies harsh if they be meant; descriptive imitation of them must be a mixture of these, a melody.”

"What will you say then," said Euripides, "of that eloquent narrative which we heard read by Herodotus at the games? Was it a history, or was it not?"

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'I did not hear it," replied Socrates; "but if you found yourself drawn by it into a sympathy with the nations and the persons which it describes; and perceived always, that no private loves and wills. operated to move them, but certain moral and universal causes, able to move whole nations at once-such as a contest for a territory, an inherited feud, the glory of a race, the power of one over many, of many over one; I say, if you found these in the books of Herodotus, and withal saw them picture-like, his narrative might be called a history. To prevent Diotima no longer, I will add but this word, that if any one should relate a history of a war of his own city against another, from the heart, as it was carried on in anger and in honor, and should so depict for us the action by holding up the chief actors to our view, as to give a continuity and wholeness to it, through the continuance of the anger that began it, producing a series of actions, purposed alike by that anger, he would have given us an epical or Homerical history. And now, Euripides, we owe a penalty for the breaking of our vow, to what power I know not, unless to Diotima."

"Let us interrupt her no more," said Euripides.

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gether, and compose a history of the world that should be a true one. When I replied that there would be no love or hate in it, he said he had no fear of that, for that each nation would play its part like a hero in an epic, and that if the whole were skillfully composed in a grand style, it would be the work of works. I told him I did not believe the time could ever come, or the writer be found for such a work. He replied that the time might come for it when all men were under one law and one religion; and a writer should be found who was a philanthropist or lover of men."

"I beseech you, Diotima," said Cymon, with an air of impatience, " do not let these discursive gentlemen cheat us of our entertainment."

Meton the jester, who had thus long remained silent, rather from want of opportunity than inclination, observing Cymon's impatience with a half sneer, remarked that Diotima did himself and his friend Cymon a great injustice in allowing this discursive talk, for it was a part of civility to adapt our conversation to the understandings of our guests, and not to insult them by soaring above their abilities." This remark occasioned a laugh, which was all that Meton looked for.

"Come," said he, "if Diotima leaves us much longer at the gate of the caravanserai, I shall dismount from my camel and go in by myself. There, now I am dismounted, and now I am gone in; poh! what a crowd is here-Greeks, Scythians, Egyptians, Persians, black slaves-sitting, squatting, standing, eating, sleeping, fighting, swearing, hustling. You yellow rascal in the blue mantle and tiara, ho, there, what woman have you under the veilcome, I will see her face. Do you jabber

"Pardon me, friends," said she, "if I add a word to Socrates' definition of an epical history, in favor of those who contend that the essence of poetry is in passion and not in meditation; confirming-what, Greek! this wretch thinks he is Socrates' opinion against me, that I am no historian. I will give you Pythagoras's opinion of the matter. When he had asked me to write a history of the Egyptians, and I said I did not love or hate them enough to do it, he replied that I had the right idea of what a history ought to be, but that none such had ever been written excepting Homer's, and that his was a fiction: he said he would have true histories written by good patriots, who loved their country and hated its enemies; that he would compare several of these to

talking Greek-a woman slave, do you say? Well, I knew that—I am a buyer-I must see her face. By Zeus! a handsome countenance! what do you call her name? Dio, what-O, Diotima, a very good name-I will give six oboli for her, without the name. Here, you rascal-Kata, what-Zena-de bya-a thousand pounds! It's more than I am worth altogether. Carry her to the chief of the Magi-she looks bookish. learned, is she? So I thought. Knows several languages; good, she's not for me; one language is enough for any woman, I

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