murder, not amusing himself with a tune on an organ. This new style of writing, or old romance revived, generated or regenerated in France or Switzerland, received its clothing from the literary taylors of Germany; and a ponderous garbit was containing the heavy armour and escutcheons, and heraldic blazonry of the feudal times, and the motly patch-work of modern illuminism. It obtained from its uncouth enormity, the name of the _Gigantesque_. If dexterity or skill happened, at any time, to betake themselves to this species of exhibition, they excited a horror and amazement, which, for a time, might suspend the faculties of the reader, but the gross improbability soon dispelled the deception; but it was reserved for English genius so to temper the marvellous with the probable, and so to mingle both with the pleasing and pathetic, as to hurry on the reader wherever the writer chose. Such were the reflections of our hero, when the “Romance of the Forest” was first sent for his critical examination. The able and inventive author chusing a different tract from a Burney and a Smith, and accommodating herself to the growing taste for the gigantesque, admitted it with the modifications of judgment in her scenery and machinery, but did not chuse it as the ground-work of her story. The actual tale is natural, and during the age and manners which she describes, is probable. No object is actually presented which was not within the compass of known existence at the time. The impressions though arising from imaginary beings, were natural in the characters and state of mind represented. An innocent and inexperienced girl, dejected with the consciousness of her destitute situation, conceiving herself the victim of villany and treachery, where she for a time had experienced protection, torn from the man that she loved, and apprehensive of violation from the man that she hated, in a vast and desolate edifice, which she had recently discovered to be the scene of murder, hearing noises at the still hour of midnight, is perfectly consonant to nature, in apprehending a visitation from the apparitions of the dead. The fears which disturb the marquis, and drive him from the abbey, the scene of conscious murder, is perfectly consonant to the feelings of enormous guilt. La Motte vacillating between the depravity of habitual indulgence ripened into profligacy, and the remains of honourable and virtuous feelings, by temporary impulse driven to crime, but by the remnants of humanity held from hardened atrocity, is a character at once natural and instructive, and very forcibly pourtrays the proclivity of pleasurable vice. The passions, characters, and manners, are in this production natural, striking, and impressive; the fable in its principal constituents, sufficiently probable to interest the reader in the fortunes of the actors; the descriptions of external nature, perhaps too exuberant; but it is the exuberance of genius prompted