We have up to this moment refrained from making any remarks or suggesting any doubts concerning the accuracy of our author's descriptions of "England and the English." We intended to have observed this abstinence until the end. But really our sense of justice forbids us to proceed, without first speaking a word or two in defence of the butchers of England. We must say that we think them an injured set of men. In these days of cheap literature and secular education, we think it perfectly conceivable that a metropolitan butcher should so far forget himself as to dabble in the French sublime; it is imaginable that he should aspire to the hand, or, at least, to the heart, of the daughter of a nobleman; we will not undertake to exclude his "brilliant articles," if he has written any such, from the pages of The Quarterly, or the columns of The Herald; he might so far divest himself of sense and suet as to win entrance, by virtue of the aforesaid "articles," into a soirée given by the President of the Royal Society; but that he should abduct a young lady of title, "have his will of her," and then cut her throat, would indicate a profundity of degradation, or an extent of reading in modern French romance, of which we would not willingly suspect a British butcher.

Admitting, however, as we do, that the author has perceived and done his best to get out of this difficulty, the charitable reader will wink at this one inaccuracy, and will grant him this one point," for the sake of the argument" of his story, which, this point being granted, progresses consistently enough.

But we have now attained the limit at which the incidents of this novel will bear being related, or even suggested, to English readers,-not, indeed, that we should think of describing those incidents could we hope that our readers were less scru

pulous; for we do not imagine that their patience would stand the test of so severe a trial. We conceive that there must be some mistake as to the restless and volatile spirit commonly attributed to the French, and the plodding and patient nature ascribed as commonly to the English, if we may be allowed to form our conclusions from the characters of French and English readers. We picture to ourselves the subscriber to a London circulating library, who is bound by some demoniacal spell, in penance for the misuse of his time, to wade through, without intermission, the seven volumes of noirceurs which constitute the remaining portion of this novel. Supposing him not to have perused the preceding seven volumes, we see him tackle the first of these residuary seven with energy and hope. He is a man of strong constitution, is well disciplined to patience by years of novel-practice, and has in his time "supped full with horrors." At the end of the first volume he does not feel particularly inconvenienced, especially if he be well-trained in English romances of the past century; haply, he even smacks his lips with relish, and receives a pleasure akin to that of the palate, which overplied with, and no longer sensible to, ordinary sauces and excitants, experiences the advent of cayenne. At about the middle of the second volume, his pleasurable feelings subside; and before he has reached its conclusion, there has arisen a settled sense of uneasiness in the lowest nervous ganglion. But the spell, whose existence we have assumed, has glued him to his chair, and remorseless Destiny ordains that he forthwith grapple with the third division of his task. Symptoms of alarm are manifested in his countenance as he advances in a region abounding with ghastly heroes, and icy chastities, and super-heavenly angels, whose nightmare natures are not incompatible with prodigious blasphemies, unspeakable sensualities, and the pettiest of petty larcenies. The veins of our novel-reader's brow are swollen; his nostrils are distended; and other signs bespeak the anguish which begins to be imposed upon him by this frightful monotony. It would be too painful to follow him step by step through the agonies

inflicted by the remaining volumes. Behold him at the end of the seventh! His eyes are bloodshot; each individual hair upon his head is writhing like a snake; the several nervous ganglions are become the several centres of a hell of impatience; he cannot stir; he cannot remove his throbbing vision from the fatal pages; he is already sensible of the rupture of some minor blood-vessels. But the penance is now all but over. See! he reads to the last line of the last page of the last tome, and, awful to relate, explodes into a red mist, which fills the room and subsides in crimson drops, like some hero of whom we remember to have been told by the respectable Macpherson.

The author, it has been said, has done his best to reconcile the conduct of his British butcher with the manners of British butchers in general, by setting him to make all kinds of ingenious excuses. Mr. Bob, being an Absolutist in all things, is, of course, a believer in Fatalism: Lady Jim having been, in fact, abolished from a state of earthly existence, it followed that Fate must have decreed such abolition; Mr. Bob having been its instrument, it followed that Fate must have decreed his instrumentality; and this gentleman having found means to escape through a backdoor, it was plain that Fate had provided such means, and had ordained such escape. It was by this process of reasoning that our hero arrived at the conclusion which we have already heard him express, "O Destiny! of how many crimes art thou the author!" &c. (see scene in Whispering Gallery); and thus, not only did he manage to retain a faith in his own heroism, but he came in time to consider himself a martyr into the bargain.

The reader may have been unable to account for certain actions and some seeming inconsistencies in the conduct of Mr. Robert Sylvester Bob. We confess that we are ourselves in this predicament. We do not see, for example, why Bob should not have urged his pie-bald courser to the terminus of a northern railway, proceeding thence to Gretna, and completing in a more becoming manner the business which he had commenced with so much spirit,-unless, indeed, he regarded marriage as a crime, as does the famous George Sand, and held

concubinage, under the existing cir cumstances, inexpedient.

Again, Mr. Bob, or else our author, upon certain occasions, seems to forget the fact, that the bulk of this novel is supposed to be related by Mr. B. himself in his Memoirs, as read by or before the coroner and “special jurymen" over their ginand-water. But those who propose to become students of the French novelists must make up their minds to meet with little difficulties of this sort; and, perhaps, it would scarcely be fair to expect from these great artists a kind of perfection to which every ordinary writer can attain.

Before taking our leave of this striking performance, it may be well that we should describe as briefly as possible the principles upon which it and numberless other romances of its class appear to have been written. Improving upon a theory which has been, of late years, in vogue among metaphysical critics-a theory which demands a supplementary and extranatural significance in works of art, the modern French romancists make this extra-natural sig nificance, not the supplementary, but the primary feature of their performances. Abandoning the har mony and sequences of Nature, they scize upon her insulated facts, therewith producing the most startlingly novel and unquestionably extra-natural combinations. Organ ised discord is the characteristic principle of their productions. To take an illustration from architecture:-When, upon the advent of Christianity, the Pagan temples fell. new temples, or basilicas, were con structed from the ruins of the old. The builders, being more devotional than æsthetical, paid little attention to the harmonious arrangement of their materials, which thus formed themselves into a queer kind of "composite," wherein were to be seen orders, hitherto regarded as incom patible with one another, presenting the most intimate and amiable juxta position. Succeeding ages, in their simpleness and reverence for autho rity, adopted these precedents; thus arose, and for a long time prevailed, a species of architecture whose leading idea, like that of our neighbours' existing fictional literature, was organised discord. We must not

and

disturb our neighbours' amour propre by allowing them to imagine that we do not acknowledge a prodigious superiority upon the part of their novelists, as regards the extent to which this principle has been carried out, in the two kinds of art. We readily admit that the early architects probably never dreamt of the degree of developement of which the French romancists have proved this principle to be capable. Neither would we hurt their feelings by ascribing their adoption of the principle in question to like causes.

No. The France of the Revolution must not be charged with having done any kind of thing out of simpleness or reverence for authority! Young France is a "sprightly Juvenal," who will never submit to the restraint of grandmamma's apron-strings. We doubt not but that, if no other good reason could be given for the adoption of the extra-natural, or rather antinatural, principle in literature, its adoption would be regarded as sufficiently justified by the undeniable fact, that Nature now was also the Nature by which things were ordered up to '89. But the truth is, that there exist various other good reasons for the adoption of this principle. First and foremost, in a worldly point of view, is the marvellous facility of composition thereby conferred. The servile necessity of imitating Nature once in good earnest abandoned, to produce striking contrasts," "thrilling situations," and "dramatic effects," becomes "as easy as lying," which, indeed, it very much resembles; and when the invention even of the facts is assumed by the author as being among his privileges-which is the case with some of the greatest of the living novelists of France; the one under review, for example-we can conceive nothing more pleasant than must be the sense of facility wherewith the writer may be supposed to float about in the chaos which he has created anew from nature and history, juxtaposing the discordant atoms, bidding novel after novel "rise like an exhalation," and coining his francs by thousands at a sitting.

Another advantage which results from this principle, and which, we imagine, weighs scarcely less in the esteem of our admiration-loving bre

thren, is the scope that is given by it for being, or, at least, seeming, profound. Nothing is easier than to suggest the being of some marvellous purpose, nothing more difficult than to demonstrate its absence, in the coagulation of incongruous materials which the adoption of the principle in question produces. Nothing is easier than to deceive most readers into a full belief that such purpose is really perceived by them; for definite shapes are always to be imagined from an absolute confusion of shapes -from clouds and cinders, for example; finally, should some churlish peruser, always boasting of his "common-sense," matter-of-fact" propensities, &c., come across an organised chaos of this class, and refuse to admit the being of such purpose, nothing is easier than to assure him that wisdom has ever dwelt in a well -whose depths he, haply, is incapable of sounding.

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A third advantage derivable from the employment of this principle is, the originality which it causes. Each man possesses some peculiarity by which he is distinguished from every other man. He who can make his genuine peculiarity appear in his writings is the only original writer. Now to do this, and at the same time to preserve the integrity of Nature, is extremely difficult. But abandon Nature, and that peculiarity becomes the centre around which the resulting chaos inevitably forms itself. Hence the prodigious flux of originality wherewith these romancists are inundating, astounding, and denaturalising themselves, their countrymen, and French-novel-reading Europe in general.

Much more might be affirmed in praise of this prolific principle, but our intention in writing this article was, not to review French novels and to analyse their principles in general, so much as to enable our readers to form accurate notions of French notions of" England and the English." This we have done; and in doing this we have, perhaps, proved that the assertion with which we commenced our criticism is not universally true; but that the exercise of the privilege of beholding ourselves with the eyes of others may sometimes be more pleasant than profitable.

HAVING given such an outline of Etrurian history, in a previous number of this Magazine, as should enable the reader to form an intelligent conception of the state of the controversy respecting the origin of the Etrurian people, we now proceed, in redemption of the pledge then offered, to consider the hypothesis of Mrs. Gray. We shall allow that lady, however, to state her own

case:

"Before discussing the precise point of time from which the annals of the Tuscans date, we will inquire who was their leader? where they landed? what inhabitants they found in Italy at the time of their arrival? what arts and sciences, laws, religion, and language they introduced and lastly, upon this subject, whence they probably came?

"Herodotus (lib. i.) says that they sailed from their native land, and established themselves in Italy under Tursenus, and all the numerous Greek writers who follow him give the same story, changing the name, as they became personally acquainted with the people, to Turrhenus. Dionysius, who alone studied them, examined their annals and wrote their history from individual research, says that they did not name themselves Turrheni but Rasena; and that the name Turrheni was probably derived from some great prince, whom Müller and Niebuhr prove to have been Tarchon, or, as Micali has found it written in inscriptions in Italy, Tarchu, and again, Tarkisa, and Tarchina. We shall spell it Tarchun, because there was no o in the oldest Etruscan alphabet; and in the same manner and for the same reason, we shall substitute u for o in Etruscan names generally. Cato, Cicero, Festus, and Servius, call the Etruscan leader Tarchon; and as to him, the various authors quoted attribute the founding of all the Etruscan states, and especially of Tarquinia, which was called after his name, the promulgation of laws, the institutions of religion, and the formation of the army, we may consider it a settled truth, that Tarchun was the first leader and ruler of the Etruscans.

"Our only testimony as to where they first landed is to be found in Herodotus

first settled in the country between the Appenines and the lower sea, and afterwards sent out colonies north and south: Umbria, 1200 years before the Christian era, included, according to Pliny, all the country from the Po as far south as Mount Garganus. This account of their first landing is not disputed by any ancient. writer, and the internal evidence of which such a matter is capable is all in its favour, such as names, dates, and the seat of government; and the certainty that all Etruria proper was once called Umbria, that the Umbrians were conquered by the Etruscans, and that several of the chief states, such as Perugia, Arezzo, and Cartina, were long indifferently called Turrhenian and Umbrian. Thus it would seem that this matter also is demonstrated, and that we bave gained the facts that the Rasena under Tarchun landed at some spot in Umbria about 1250 before Christ, the period at which their own annals commence; being, according to the best scholars, 1187 before Christ. As the country was called Umbria, it must have been inhabited by the Umbrians; and as they conquered the Pelasgi, and as many of the Turrhenian cities were also called Pelasgic, so it would seem that the inhabitants with whom they first met were Umbri and Pelasgi.

*

"We think it not doubtful, borne out at least by every collateral proof, that they were a colony from the great and ancient city of Resen, or RSN, as it is written in the Hebrew Bible, the capital of Aturia, in the land of Assyria.* It is situated on the Tigris, a great na. vigable river, and the name is by some called the Chaldee, and by others the Egyptian form of pronouncing Assyria, the Hebrew S being sounded in Chaldee, T. It is mentioned by Moses in the book of Genesis, x. 12, as one of the oldest and one of the greatest, if not the very greatest city, then in the world. He says, Out of that land (the land of Shinaar) went forth Assur (or the Assyrians, i. e. the tribe of Assur), and builded Nineveh, and the city of Rehoboth, and Calah, and ReSeN, between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city. This was written by Moses, the prince of Egypt, brought up in the court of Pharaoh, and acquainted with Zoan the hundred-gated