One cannot help fancying the novelist in some perplexing dream—one of those frequently recurring visions, half night-mare half asphyxia, in which the sufferer, although making the most strenuous efforts to _run_, finds a walk or a crawl the _ne plus ultra_ of his success in locomotion. The plot is monstrously improbable, and yet not so much improbable as inconsequential. A German critic would say that the whole is excessively _ill-motivert_. No one action follows necessarily upon any one other. There is, at all times, the greatest parade of _measures_, but measures that have no comprehensible result. The author works busily for a chapter or two with a view of bringing matters in train for a certain end; and then suffers this end to be either omitted—unaccomplished—or brought to pass by accidental and irrelevant circumstances. The reader of taste very soon perceives this defect in the conduct of the story, and, ceasing to feel any interest in marches and countermarches that promise no furtherance of any object, abandons himself to the investigation of the page only which is immediately before him. Despairing of all amusement from the _construction_ of the book, he falls back upon its immediate descriptions. But, alas, what is there here to excite any emotion in the bosom of a well-read man, beyond that of contempt? If an occasional interest is aroused, he feels it due, not to the novelist, but to the historical reminiscences which even that novelist’s inanity cannot render altogether insipid. The turgid pretension of the style annoys, and the elaborately-interwoven pedantry irritates, insults, and disgusts. He must be blind, indeed, who cannot understand the great pains taken by Mr. Ainsworth to interlard the book in question with second-hand hits of classical and miscellaneous erudition; and he must be equally blind who cannot perceive that _this_ is the chicanery which has so impressed the judgment, and dazzled the imagination of such critics as he of the aforesaid Magazine. We know nothing at all of Mr. Ainsworth’s scholarship. There are some very equivocal blunders in “Crichton,” to be sure; but _Ainsworth_ is a classical name, and we must make _very_ great allowances for the usual errors of press. We say, however, that, from all that appears in the novel in question, he may be as really ignorant as a bear. True erudition—by which term we here mean only to imply much diversified reading—is certainly discoverable—is positively indicated only in its ultimate and total _results_. We have observed elsewhere, that the mere grouping together of fine things from the greatest multiplicity of the rarest works, or even the apparently natural inweaving into any composition of the sentiments and manner of these works, is an attainment within the reach of every moderately-informed, ingenious, and not indolent man, having access to any ordinary collection of good books. Of all vanities the vanity of the unlettered pedant is the most