author think himself justified in filling his page with their
abominations? It betrays a lamentable deficiency of tact and judgment,
to imagine, as the author of Melmoth appears to do, that he may seize
upon nature in her most unhallowed or disgusting moods, and dangle her
in the eyes of a decorous and civilized community. We shall not stop to
stigmatize, as it deserves, the wild and flagrant calumnies which he
insinuates against three-fourths of his countrymen, by raking in the
long-forgotten rubbish of Popery for extinct enormities, which he
exaggerates as the inevitable result, rather than the casual abuse of
the system, and brands with an intolerant zeal, quite as uncharitable as
that which he condemns. These faults are either so peculiar to the
individual, or in their nature so obviously indefensible, as to repel
rather than invite imitation. But there is another peculiarity in the
productions of this gentleman which claims a more detailed notice,
because it seems likely to have extensive effects in corrupting others:
--we mean his taste for horrible and revolting subjects. We thought we
had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly
and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and
its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,--who is never so
much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors
accumulate." He assimilates the sluggish sympathies of his readers to
those of sailors and vulgar ballad readers, who cannot be excited to an
interest in the battle of the Arethusa, unless they learn that "her
sails smoaked with brains, and her scuppers ran blood;"--a line which
threatens him with formidable competitors from before the mast. Mere
physical horror, unalleviated by an intense mental interest, or
redeeming charities of the heart, may possess a certain air of
originality, not from the want of ability in former writers to delineate
such scenes, but from then-deference to the "_multaque tolles ex
oculis_" of Horace; from the conviction of their utter unfitness for