it knows how entirely its interest is dependent on the unity of interest and extraordinary fidelity and skill with which, within narrow limits, the characters, events, and still life, are portrayed. It is the same in history. The success of Alison's _History of Europe_ has been mainly owing to the fortunate unity of the subject, and the dramatic character of the events which, within the space of twenty years, were thus crowded into the theatre of human affairs. In those romances again, and they are many, in which great latitude in the unities has been taken, it is very rarely that the skill of the artist has succeeded in preventing a painful break in the interest, or cessation in the sympathy, where any considerable transposition of place or overleaping of time occurs. It is very frequent in James's novels to see this done; but we believe he never yet had a reader in whom it did not excite a feeling of regret. When a chapter begins--"We must now transport the reader to a distant part of the country"--or "Many years after the events detailed in the last chapter had occurred, two persons met in an hostelry on the side of a forest," &c., we may rely upon it that, not only is the scene changed, but the interest, for the time at least, is lost. The pictures formed in the mind, the interest awakened in the events, the admiration felt for the characters, are alike at an end. The chain of sympathy is broken with the rupture of the continuity of events. The reader's mind sets out as it were on a new track, in which the sails must be spread, and the oars worked afresh. Everything must be done over again; fresh pictures conjured up in the mind, new interests awakened in the breast from the last starting-point. But it is seldom that such new interests can supply the want of those which have been lost, or that, where such a system is adopted, even a sustained sympathy can be maintained throughout. We do not say that the first love is exclusive of any other; but only that the interest is not to be transferred from one to the other, until a considerable time has elapsed, and no small pains have been taken. Several such dislocations of place, or violations of time, will prove fatal to a novel, though written with the utmost ability, and managed in other respects with the most consummate skill. Every reader of Mr James's romances, which in many respects possess high merits, must be sensible of the truth of this observation; and all the richness of colouring, and fidelity in drawing, in Sir L. Bulwer's splendid historical romance of _Rienzi_, cannot take away the painful impression produced by the long interval which elapses between the commencement of the story, where the characters first appear, its middle, where the real interest is developed, and its termination, where the catastrophe occurs.