How changed is the taste of verse, prose, and painting, since _le bon vieux temps_, dear madam! Nothing attracts us but what terrifies, and is within--_if_ within--a hair’s breadth of positive disgust. Some of the strange things they write remind me of Squoire Richard’s visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says: “Odd, they are _pure_ grim devils,”--particularly a wild and hideous tale called ‘Frankenstein.’ MRS. PIOZZI: _Letters to Mme. D’Arblay_, in the latter’s ‘Diary and Letters’; edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1880. * * * * * [Sidenote: Scott’s remarks.] The feeling with which we perused the unexpected and fearful, yet, allowing the possibility of the event, very natural conclusion of Frankenstein’s experiment, shook a little even our firm nerves.... It is no slight merit in our eyes that the tale, though wild in incident, is written in plain and forcible English, without exhibiting that mixture of hyperbolical Germanisms with which tales of wonder are usually told. The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed; and his[7] descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty. The self-education of the monster, considering the slender opportunities of acquiring knowledge that he possessed, we have already noticed as improbable and over-strained. SIR WALTER SCOTT: ‘Remarks on Frankenstein,’ _Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine_, March, 1818. (‘Scott’s Miscellanies,’ _vol. i._ Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841.) * * * * * [Sidenote: Lamb’s praise.] Mrs. Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ ... he [Charles Lamb] thought the most extraordinary realization of the idea of a being out of nature which had ever been effected. THOMAS NOON TALFOURD: ‘The Works of Charles Lamb, His Letters, and a Sketch of his Life.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1838. * * * * * [Sidenote: Intellectual resemblance to Shelley.] We have spoken of Mrs. Shelley’s similarity in genius to her husband’s--we by no means think her his equal. She has not his subtlety, swiftness, wealth of imagination, and is never caught up (like Ezekiel by his lock of hair) into the same rushing whirlwind of inspiration. She has much, however, of his imaginative and of his speculative qualities--her tendency, like his, is to the romantic, the ethereal, and the terrible. The tie detaining her, as well as him to the earth, is slender--her protest against society is his, copied out in a female hand--her style is carefully and successfully modeled upon his--she bears in brief, to him, the resemblance which Laone did to Laon, which Astarte did to Manfred.... Perhaps, indeed, intercourse with a being so peculiar ... has somewhat affected the originality, and narrowed the extent of her own genius.