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comes late in the field. In answer to the charge of choosing a Newgate hero, the romancer is surely entitled to say, "I did not select him because he was a house-breaker, but because he was a prison-breaker." And if mischief arise from the delineation of the characters of such criminals─which is a separate question, and would lead us as far afield as the Robbers of Schiller led the young reprobate nobles who turned thieves in imitation, and might suggest a committee of inquiry concerning Bardolph and Company, amongst a crowd of others─but if mischief arise, which course has the directest tendency to produce it?─that which introduces the criminal into the story to play off his brutalities unrestricted, and, as it were, under cover of false dates and places─or that which avows the heroship on the title-page, and warns off those of timid tastes and trembling morals? People seem to object to no atrocity, no vulgarity, so that it be unexpected, and not concentrated in the hero. We take up the most innocent-looking Arcadian sort of books, and find ourselves in the heart of Newgate. Of this we may have some cause to complain; but we cannot complain of going to Tyburn, when the hero's very name tells us we shall be taken there in the end, wheresoever the story may previously wind.
Gay has been libelled for his Beggar's Opera, and Fielding has been abused for his Jonathan Wild the Great, (excellent company, wherein to sin or to suffer martyrdom!) but those exquisite satires, if liable to be misunderstood by the dull, are as innocent of evil as they are brave in purpose and profound in wit. They are what they profess to be, and do not cheat the reader with a promise of something different. It is so, in its degree, with the romance to which we have referred. It can have injured or imposed upon no family on earth, except the Fudge Family.[1] We now approach the consideration of works on which their author has unquestionably employed his best powers, and in which at least he has not sinned in point of subject. With the new year, he commenced two new romances. Guy Fawkes appeared in the Miscellany, and was completed in eighteen monthly numbers, when it was reprinted in three volumes. The sum received during this period from the publisher exceeded 1500l. Of the several romances that have been founded partly or entirely upon the same subject, it is by far the most striking. The bold and simple painting of character, the felicitous description, the hair-breadth 'scapes which the reader follows with an interest tremblingly alive, the constant fertility of invention, while the stream of historical truth flows on in the midst of all, denote the abundance of the resources which this writer always brings to his task. The time and subject seem new in his hands, because his manner, and his materials (save the simple truth upon and around which he works them), are entirely his own.
The Tower of London─the twin-born romance, running chapter by chapter with the foregoing─is a work of yet more remarkable power, because it is more fully and consistently sustained to the close. It had been the author's wish─if we are not misinformed─from the hour when he first saw the old fortress, to write a romance on one of the thousand almost incredible truths with which the memory that sanctifies it is peopled. The companion-thought to this, was the hope to connect another historical legend with the Castle of
- ↑ It has innocently given rise to one example of immorality; its publisher having advertised its mischievous tendency in the public prints, while he was all the time selling the work, and meditating new and cheaper attractions for it.