enlist and keep up the interest of his readers in his two chief characters, why has he distracted the attention by the introduction of The Reign of Terror, that most real of tragedies, whose horrors exceed anything that romance can imagine, whose thrilling story stops the pulsation of the heart for anything less terrible? The mind should have been left undistracted to contemplate the stern, Doric self-sacrifice of Zanoni! The author should not have sacrificed the unity of effect for the dying struggles of Robespierre, or any other human butcher in the blood-bespattered shambles of Paris. We can see what misled Bulwer. Not satisfied with the grandeur of his original conception of the _dénouement_, he sought to increase the interest by the clap-trap effect of rapidly shifting the perilous incidents in which all the chief actors are involved. This is a trick he has learned behind the foot-lights, and not in the study of the great old masters. There are numerous minor errors in the plot. Glyndon’s _liaison_ with Floretta does not advance the story, and the only part she plays in evolving the crisis, is the betrayal of Viola at Paris. If the plot had been handled properly, there would have been no necessity for her agency here. But the desire to paint mere sensual love, in this character, induced Bulwer to patch her into the tale. He has been persuaded, from the same reason, to introduce other unimportant characters we might name. In short, his motley array of personages reminds us of Burke’s graphic picture of Chatham’s last piebald ministry, where he compares it to a piece of mosaic, “here a bit of black stone and there a bit of white,” and humorously depicts the consternation of men, who had been all their lives libelling each other, on finding themselves “pigging together in the same truckle-bed.” In like manner the robber figures in the scene. So do Mervale and that worthy shrew his wife. These are all gross faults; for the necessity of preserving that oneness and entireness of effect, of which we have spoken so much, exists in peculiar force in a highly imaginative work like this. The introduction of supernal agents is, at all times, a dangerous experiment; and, when they are introduced, the illusion is to be kept up at every sacrifice. This can scarcely be done where the reader listens on one page to the converse of immortal powers, and on the next to the wrangling of a cross, sleepy wife with a drunken husband—when we are hurried from the lofty aspirations of Menjour and Zanoni, to the silly love toying betwixt Glyndon and Floretta. This brings us to another error in the author—an error which lies at the very bottom of all his errors.