Westward Ho! partakes much more of the character of biography and history than of the ordinary sentimental novel. Love plays a great part in the progress of the story, as it does in the lives of most men; but it is as motive influencing character and determining action that it is exhibited, not as itself the sole interest of life, the single feeling which redeems human existence from dulness and inward death. The love which acts on the career and character of Amyas Leigh does not spend itself in moonlight monologues or in passionate discourses with its object; nor does the story depend for its interest upon the easily roused sympathy of even the stupidest readers with the ups and downs, the fortunes and emotions, of a passion common in certain degrees and certain kinds to all the race. It is no such

narrow view of life that is presented here, but rather that broad sympathy with human action and human feeling in its manifold completeness which gives to art a range as wide as life itself, and throws a consecrating beauty over existence from the cradle to the grave, wherever human affections act, wherever human energies find their object and their field, wherever the battle between right and wrong, between sense and spirit, is waged-wherever and by whatever means characters are trained, principles strength

ened, and humanity developed. And this comprehensive character-displaying itself in assigning its true relative value to each thing-we take to be the distinguishing test of high art, and that which marks it out from all mere sentimentalism, prettiness, eclecticism, or whatever other name we may give to man's attempts to reduce nature to some standard of his own taste, or the taste of a particular age or clique, instead of endeavouring to enlarge his heart and open his eyes to see and feel the wonders and the splendours which are poured down from heaven on earth, in the least of which as in the greatest the Infinite reveals Himself for those who through the letter can penetrate to the spirit.

The Spectator,

March 17, 1855.

WILSON'S "NOCTES AMBROSIANE."

MANY of the causes which contributed to the interest excited by the Noctes Ambrosianæ, on their first appearance in successive numbers of Blackwood's Magazine, have ceased to operate. Political measures round which parties were then struggling with fierce passion and loud mutual denunciation have been built as firmly into the constitution as Magna Charta itself. The men engaged in those conflicts have become historical personages, or have fallen into utter oblivion; in either case escaping from the partial judgments of that time, and no longer lending a charm not its own to panegyric or invective. So, too, the literary celebrities of that day have either attained a fixed rank or been forgotten; we no longer interest ourselves in disputes about their claims. And in the case of both political and literary personages, what was then fresh and piquant personality has become

familiar history or stale gossip; pointed allusions have lost their force, half-revelations have been superseded; and we wonder, as we read, at the amount of feeling exhibited towards men and women who are now, for the most part, shadowy names, with scarce an association connecting them with our living sympathies. Yet, in spite of this inevitable effect of the lapse of twenty or thirty years upon papers discussing so largely topics and people of temporary interest, such is the high quality of the genius lavished upon them, that the public will read by far the larger portion of the Noctes with as much delight as at first. They appear now with a claim to rank as English classics-as the choicest production of their author, one of the most highly endowed men of his time. Their chief interlocutor, the eidolon of the Ettrick Shepherd, is ranked by Professor Wilson's admirers with the most forcible characters known to us through history or created by fiction. Thus, Professor Ferrier, introducing the Noctes with a preface, says "In wisdom, the Shepherd equals the Socrates of Plato; in humour, he surpasses the Falstaff of Shakspere; clear and prompt, he might have stood up against Dr. Johnson in close and peremptory argument; fertile and copious, he might have rivalled Burke in amplitude of declamation." Socrates, Fal

staff, Dr. Johnson, and Burke, all in one! and that one talking a broad Doric, that seems to an English ear the native dialect of humour, plastic alike to pathos, fun, and homely shrewdness; a shepherd, too, knowing all the shy charms of nature in remotest haunts of solitude and silence-all the racy characteristics of pastoral life and pastoral people, their joys, their sorrows, their pleasures, and their business. Estimated thus, the Shepherd of the Noctes would really be the most marvellous of the creations of that literature which stands highest among the literatures of Europe for its presentation of human character. And, with some qualification, the estimate is not so absurd as at first sight our habitual reverence for such names as Professor Ferrier has brought into his comparison would consider it.

The truth is, that Wilson, one of the most remarkable men that ever lived for the variety and strength of his powers, has thrown into the Shepherd's talk the teeming activity of his own mind and heart; and so far as characters are displayed in life, and in that fiction which reflects life, solely by their desultory talk, the Shepherd may fairly be matched with any one. If it was simply as a shrewd talker that we knew Socrates-if Falstaff was to us simply a sayer of good things, Dr. Johnson a hard hitter