public exhibition. There is, however, a numerous class of inferior
caterers to the public, ready to minister to any appetite, however foul
and depraved, if they be once furnished with a precedent; and we foresee
an inundation of blood and abomination if they be not awed or ridiculed
into silence. We have quietly submitted to these inflictions from two or
three distinguished writers, whose talents may extenuate, though they
cannot justify, such outrages upon feeling. When regular artists and
professors conduct us into their dissecting room, the skill with which
they anatomise may reconcile us to the offensiveness of the operation;
but if butchers and resurrection-men are to drag us into their shambles,
while they mangle human carcases with their clumsy and unhallowed hands,
the stoutest spectators must turn from the exhibition with sickness and
disgust.

Were any proof wanting that this Golgotha style of writing is likely to
become contagious, and to be pushed to a more harrowing extravagance at
each successive imitation, Mr. Maturin would himself supply it....

We have omitted this miscreant's flippant allusion to Madame de Sevigné
and his own damnation, uttered in a spirit which (to use the author's
own words upon another occasion), "mingled ridicule with horror, and
seemed like a Harlequin in the infernal regions flirting with the
furies:"--But we must not forget to mention, as little characteristic
touches in this scene of preposterous horrors, that the monster who
describes it was also a parricide, and that the female, on whose dying
agonies he had feasted, was his only sister! After this appalling
extract, we need not pursue our quotations from pages which, as more
than one of the personages say of themselves, seem to swim in blood and
fire; and we shall conclude with the following passage from a dream--