"Mr. Blackbrook and his disciples are hapless materialists, verse-makers without a sense of the beautiful. They are patronized by those to whom they write down; and the effect of their lucubrations is to enchain the imagination, to debase the moral capacity, to weaken that spiritual faith which disdains the horrors of the church-yard. Mr. Blackbrook's adventures in search of despair were undertaken, to our mind, in a cold-blooded spirit. A resolute determination to discover the gloomiest phase of every earthly matter, a longing for the applause of a foolish clique, and a confused idea that Chatterton was a poet because he perished miserably, while Byron owed his inspiration to his domestic unhappiness--make up that picture of a verse-writer which we have endeavored to delineate. When extraordinary vanity is allied to very ordinary ability, the combination is an unwholesome, ascetic, weak, and deformed mind: such a mind has Mr. Blackbrook. He endeavors to drag us into a vault, when we would regard the heavenly aspect of death. Ask him to solve the great mystery, and he points to the fading corpse. His tears suggest the use of onions; and his threats of self-destruction, remind us of the rouge and Indian ink of an indifferent melodramatic actor. We have no respect for his misfortunes, since we find that he esteems them only as opportunities for display: we know that despair is welcome to him. He turns his back to the sun, and rejoices to see the length of shade he can throw upon the earth. Nature to him is only a vast charnel-house--so constructed that he may sing a life-long requiem. He would have us journey through life with our eyes fixed upon the ground, scenting the gases of decay. But wiser men--poets of the soul--bid us look up to heaven, nor disdain, as we raise our heads, to mark the beauty of the lily--to gather, and with hearty thanks, the fragrance of the rose." MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. (_Continued from page 396._) CHAPTER XIII.