nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all,
and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the
treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment
might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little
wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life,
that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more
deviate from nature--show more of that inconsequence, which has a
natural alliance with frenzy,--than a great genius in his "maddest
fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is
acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels,--as they existed some
twenty or thirty years back,--those scanty intellectual viands of the
whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled
for ever the innutritious phantoms,--whether he has not found his
brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and
where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent
incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some
third-rate love intrigue--where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour
and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and
Bond-street--a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than
he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the
productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the
persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an
endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute
of motive:--we meet phantoms in our known walks; _fantasques_ only
christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we
have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the
Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner
nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and
upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to
the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences. By