natural picture of a young thief, that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen money in the hollow tree, and finding it again when in despair; and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature; and putting out of question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceeds Crusoe. "Roxana" (first edition) is the next in interest; though he left out the best part of it in subsequent editions, from a foolish hypercriticism of his friend Southerne. But "Moll Flanders," the "Account of the Plague," &c. &c., are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character.

It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the masterpiece.

Again it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus," of the same author,-a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be terined the secondary novels or romances of Defoe.

While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the " Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," and shall continue to do so, we trust while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer,-four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation Roxana,"

'Singleton,' "Moll Flanders," "Colonel Jack," are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of Defoe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them! They are, in their way, as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.

But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness, -is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance, or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart (the worst solitude), goes to hide his illpurchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it again,-whom hath he there to sympathize with him? or of what sort are his associates ?

The narrative manner of Defoe has a naturalness about it beyond that of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what really happened to himself. To this the extreme homeliness of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense, that which comes home to the reader.

The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it: therefore they tell their own tales (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark), as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, "I say," Mind," and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of Defoe can never again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that of the servantmaid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription. Singleton, the pirate; Colonel Jack, the thief; Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot ; Roxana, harlot and something worse,-would be startling ingredients in the bill of fare of modern literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots, are the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of Defoe! We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish the fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing.

Recollections of a Late Royal Academician.

(The Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831.)

WHAT Apelles was to the Grecian Alexander, the same to the Russian was the late George Dawes. None but Apelles might attempt the lineaments of the world's conqueror; none but our Academician could have done justice to the lines to the Czar, and his courtiers. There they hang, the labour of ten plodding years, in an endless gallery, erected for the nonce, in the heart of Imperial Petersburgh-eternal monuments of barbarian taste submitted to half-civilized cunning-four hundred fierce Half-Lengths, all male, and all military; like the pit in a French theatre, or the characters in Timon as it was last acted, with never a woman among them. Chaste sitters to Vandyke, models of grace and womanhood; and thou Dame Venetia Digby, fairest among thy fair compeers at Windsor, hide your pure pale cheeks, and cool English beauties, before this suffocating horde of Scythian riflers, this male chaos! Your cold oaken frames shall wane before the gorgeous buildings,

With Tartar faces throng'd, and horrent uniforms.

One emperor contended for the monopoly of the ancient; two were competitors at once for the pencil of the modern Apelles. The Russian carried it

against the Haytian by a single length. And if fate, as it was at one time nearly arranged, had wafted D. to the shores of Hayti-with the same complacency, in his art, with which he persisted in daubing in, day after day, his frozen Muscovites, he would have sate down for life to smutch in upon canvas the faces of blubber-lipped sultanas, or the whole male retinue of the dingy court of Christophe. For in truth a choice of subjects was the least of D.'s A Goddess from Cnidus, or from the Caffre coast, was equal to him; Lot or Lot's wife; the charming widow H., or her late husband.

care.

"

My acquaintance with D. was in the outset of his art, when the graving tools, rather than the pencil, administered to his humble wants. Those implements, as is well known, are not the most favourable to the cultivation of that virtue, which is esteemed next to godliness. He might "wash his hands in innocency," and so metaphorically "approach an altar; but his material puds were anything but fit to be carried to church. By an ingrained economy in soap-if it was not for pictorial effect rather--he would wash (on Sundays) the inner oval, or portrait, as it may be termed, of his countenance, leaving the unwashed temples to form a natural black frame round the picture, in which a dead white was the predominant colour. This, with the addition of green spectacle, made necessary by the impairment, which his graving labours by day and night (for he was ordinarily at them for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four) had brought upon his visual faculties, gave him a singular appearance, when he took the air abroad; insomuch, that I have seen a crowd of young men and boys following him along Oxford Street with admiration not without shouts; even as the Youth of Rome, we read in Vasari, followed the steps of Raphael with acclamations for his genius, and for his beauty, when he proceeded from his workshop to chat with Cardinals and Popes at the Vatican.

The family of D. were not at this time in affluent circumstances. His father, a clever artist, had outlived the style of art in which he excelled most of his contemporaries. He, with the father of the celebrated Morland, worked for the shop of Carrington and Bowles, which exists still for the poorer sort of caricatures, on the north side of St. Paul's Church Yard. They did clever things in colours. At an inn in Reading a screen is still preserved, full of their labours; but the separate portions of either artist are now undistinguishable. I remember a mother teaching her child to read (B. Barton has a copy of it); a laundress washing; a young Quaker, a beautiful subject. But the flower of their forgotten productions hangs still at a public-house on the left hand, as thou arrivest, reader, from the now Highgate archway, at the foot of the descent where Crouch End begins, on thy road to green Hornsey. Turn in, and look at it, for the sight is well worth a cup of excusatory cyder. In the parlour to the right you will find it-an antiquated subject--a damsel sitting at her breakfast table in a gown of the flowered chintz of our grandmothers, with a tea-service before her of the same pattern. The effect is most delicate. Why have these harmonies-these agrémens-no place in the works of modern art?

With such niceties in his calling D. did not much trouble his head, but, after an ineffectual experiment to reconcile his eye-sight with his occupation, boldly quitted it, and dashed into the beaten road of common-place portraiture in oil. The Hopners, and the Lawrences, were his Vandykes, and his Velasquezes; and if he could make anything like them, he insured himself immortality. With such guides he struggled on through laborious nights and days, till he reached the eminence he aimed at-of mediocrity.-Having gained that summit, he sate down contented. If the features were but cognoscible, no matter whether the flesh resembled flesh, or oil-skin. For the thousand tints the grains-which in life diversify the nose, the chin, the cheek-which a Reynolds can but coarsely counterfeit-he cared nothing at all about them. He left such scrupulosities to opticians and anatomists. If the features

were but there, the character of course could not be far off. A lucky hit which he made in painting the very dress of a dressy lady-Mrs. W-e-, whose handsome countenance also, and tall elegance of shape, were too palpable entirely to escape under any masque of oil, with which even D. could overlay them-brought to him at once an influx of sitters, which almost rivalled the importunate calls upon Sir Thomas. A portrait he did soon after, of the Princess Charlotte, clenched his fame. He proceeded Academician. At that memorable conjunctnre of time it pleased the Allied Sovereigns to visit England.

I called upon D. to congratulate him upon a crisis so doubly eventful. His pleasant housekeeper seenied embarrassed; owned that her master was alone. But could he be spoken with? With some importunity I prevailed upon her to usher me into his painting-room. It was in Newman Street. At his easel stood D., with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side a— live goose. I inquired into this extraordinary combination. Under the rose he informed me, that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall, against an expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns to that place. I smiled at an engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small gains was never one of D.'s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of warriors, kings, rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The Wolga, the Don, and the Nieper, were there, or their representative River Gods; and Father Thames clubbed urns with the Vistula. Glory with her dazzling eagle were not absent, nor Fame, nor Victory. The shade of Rubens might have evoked the mighty allegories. But what was the Goose? He was evidently sitting for a something.

D. at last informed me, that having fixed upon a group of rivers, he could not introduce the Royal Thames without his swans. That he had inquired the price of a live swan, and it being more than he was prepared to give for it, he had bargained with the poulterer for the next thing to it; adding significantly, that it would do to roast, after it had served its turn to paint swans by. Reader, this is a true story.

So entirely devoid of imagination, or any feeling for his high art, was this Painter, that for the few historical pictures he attempted, any sitter might sit for any character. He took once for a subject The Infant Hercules. Did he choose for a model some robust antique? No. He did not even pilfer from Sir Joshua, who was nearer to his own size. But from a show he hired to sit to him a child in years indeed (though no Infant), but in fact a precocious Man, or human portent, that was disgustingly exhibiting at that period; a thing to be strangled. From this he formed his Infant Hercules. In a scriptural flight he next attempted a Samson in the lap of Dalilah. A Dalilah of some sort was procurable for love or money, but who should stand for the Jewish Hercules? He hired a tolerably stout porter, with a thickish head of hair. curling in yellowish locks, but lithe-much like a wig. And these were the robust strengths of Samson.

I once was a witness to a family scene in his painting closet, which I had entered rather abruptly, and but for his encouragement, should as hastily have retreated. He stood with displeased looks eyeing a female relative-whom I had known under happier auspices--that was kneeling at his feet with a baby in her arms, with her eyes uplifted and suppliant. Though I could have previously sworn to the virtue of Miss, yet casual slips have been known. There are such things as families disgraced, where least you would have expected it. The child might be- ; I had heard of no wedding-I was the last person to pry into family secrets-when D. relieved my uneasy cogitations by explaining, that the innocent, good-humoured creature before me (such as she ever was, and is now that she is married) with a baby borrowed from a publichouse, was acting Andromache to his Ulysses, for the purpose of transferring upon canvas a tender situation from the Troades of Seneca.

On a subsequent occasion I knocked at D.'s door. I had chanced to have been in a dreamy humour previously. I am not one that often poetises, but I had been musing-coxcombically enough in the heart of Newman Street, Oxford Road-upon Pindus, and the Aonian Maids. The Lover of Daphne was in my mind-when, answering to my summons, the door opened, and there stood before me, laurel-crowned, the God himself, unshorn Apollo. I was beginning to mutter apologies to the Celestial Presence - when on the thumb of the right hand of the Delian (his left held the harp) I spied a palette, such as painters carry, which immediately reconciled me to the whimsical transformation of my old acquaintance-with his own face, certainly any other than Grecianesque-into a temporary image of the oracle-giver of Delphos. To have impersonated the Ithacan was little : he had been just sitting for a God. -It would be no incurious inquiry to ascertain what the minimum of the faculty of imagination, ever supposed essential to painters along with poets, is, that, in these days of complaints of want of patronage towards the fine arts, suffices to dub a man a R1 A

-n.

Not only had D. no imagination to guide him in the treatment of such subjects, but he had no relish for high art in the productions of the great masters. He turned away from them as from something foreign and irrelative to him, and his calling. He knew he had neither part nor portion in them. Cozen him into the Stafford or the Angerstein Gallery, he involuntarily turned away from the Baths of Diana-the Four Ages of Guercino-the Lazarus of Piombo-to some pretty piece of modern art that had been inconsistently thrust into the collection through favour. On that he would dwell and pore, blind as the dead to the delicacies that surrounded him. There he might learn something. There he might pilfer a little. There was no grappling with Titian, or Angelo.

The narrowness of his domestic habits to the very last, was the consequence of his hard bringing up, and unexpected emergence into opulence. While rolling up to the ears in Russian roubles, a penny was still in his eyes the same important thing, which it had with some reason seemed to be, when a few shillings were his daily earnings. When he visited England a short time before his death, he reminded an artist of a commission, which he had executed for him in Russia, the package of which was still unpaid." At this time he was not unreasonably supposed to have realized a sum little short of half a million sterling. What became of it was never known; what gulf, or what Arctic vorago, sucked it in, his acquaintance in those parts have better means of guessing, than his countrymen. It is certain that few of the latter were anything the better for it.

It was before he expatriated himself, but subsequently to his acquisition of pictorial honours in this country, that he brought home two of his brother Academicians to dine with him. He had given no orders extraordinary to his housekeeper. He trusted, as he always did, to her providing. She was a shrewd lass, and knew, as we say, a bit of her master's mind.

It had happened that on the day before, D. passing near Clare Market by one of those open shambles, where tripe and cow-heel are exposed for sale, his eye was arrested by the sight of some tempting flesh rolled up. It is a part of the intestines of some animal, which my olfactory sensibilities never permitted me to stay long enough to inquire the name of. D. marked the curious involutions of the unacquainted luxury; the harmony of its colours--a sable vert-pleased his eye; and, warmed with the prospect of a new flavour, for a few farthings he bore it off in triumph to his housekeeper. It so happened that his day's dinner was provided, so the cooking of the novelty was for that time necessarily suspended.

Next day came. The hour of dinner approached. His visitors, with no very romantic anticipations, expected a plain meal at least; they were prepared