they have lost it. But that they are clumsy impostors, and deserve no such lenity, I could end their anxiety in a word; for, if I really have a majority in the borough, I think I shall sit for it myself. You laugh-but I can't come back to the army, after six years' desertion, to face your Waterloo reputation upon a "lady peace" establishment. And a seat in Parliament gives a man a semblance of pursuits in life, which (where no trouble attaches) is convenient. You will come over to my election, (if I find I can command the place,) and help to eat the bad dinners, and kiss the people's wives. Drop no word, however, I charge you, in the interim; because I must bamboozle these coxcombs, who meant to bamboozle me. The hook is in their mouths, and I shall be able to keep them on, without giving either a reasonable expectation. The moment they ask my decision, I shall give it against them; and yet, before them, I will have gained all they sought to withhold from me. This is not a world, Robert, in which a man can live by the use of candour, or of liberal principle; and he who is wise will fall into its spirit, and acquire a taste for hollow-heartedness and selfish feeling. To have one's "opinions" always flying out against those of everybody else one's heart pinned upon one's sleeve-is it not to fight too much at a disadvantage? And may there not be some whim in shaking hands with a man very cordially, when you know he means to do you a mortal injury, and when you have digged

a countermine, (in the way of surprise,) which, in five minutes, is to blow him to the moon! When I was poor, who ever behaved even fairly to me? And is it not monstrous vanity to expect that I now should behave disinterestedly to those I love not?

Farewell till we meet, which I hope will not be many days; but I must (with the kind aid of Sir W. Beauvoir) stamp my credit in the right way, before I go-here-in Glostershire. I have got a touch, you see, of the true moneyed feeling already-letting policy detain me in one place, when inclination would carry me to another.

Fare you well once more, until we shake hands; which, with you, I would not do, unless I did it honestly. I shall be in town, I believe, by the 28th; and a Lieutenant-Colonel, I am sure, can leave a regiment at any time. As a proof that (for my part) we are still upon the same terms that we used to be―ask your father if he will

present" me. I could make old Sir Walter here, I have no doubt, submit to the duty, (and, in case I go to the continent, it may be convenient to me to get this done ;) but I would not have him able to say that I ever hoaxed him out of any politeness worth a moment's consideration. Besides, I know enough of your father, to believe that he will feel no hesitation in obliging me; and I write to shew you that I can ask a favour from a friend, when it is such a favour as may be conferred by one gentleman upon another.

THE DEVIL'S ELIXIR is, we think, upon the whole, our chief favourite among the numerous works of a man of rare and singular genius. It contains in itself the germ of many of his other performances; and one particular idea, in which, more than any other, he, as a romancer, delighted, has been repeated by him in many various shapes, but never with half the power and effect in which it has been elaborated here. This idea is, to be sure, exactly what the minor English cri

tics will think they say quite enough of, when they pronounce it ore rotundo, a vile German idea. No matter, whatever these gentry may say, for as to thinking-of that they are tolerably guiltless-whatever small men, accustomed to move in one very small sphere of intellect, may say, the horrible is quite as legitimate a field of poetry and romance, as either the pathetic or the ludicrous. It is absurdity to say that Mrs Radcliffe has exhausted this. That very clever lady

had not brains to exhaust anythingand she no more worked out horror, than she did the scenery of the Appenines. Maturin's Montorio is far above any horrors she ever excogitated -the St Leon of Godwin, again, is very far above the Family of Montorio -and Schiller's Ghost-seer is well worth both of these. And why? why, simply, because Godwin is a hundred times a cleverer man than Maturin, and because Schiller was a thousand times a cleverer man than Godwin. Nothing that is a part, a real essential part, of human nature, ever can be exhausted-and the regions of fear and terror never will be so.-Human flesh will creep to the end of time at the witches of Macbeth, exactly because to the end of time it will creep in a midnight charnel-vault :

So was it when the world began,
So ever will it be.

Ghosts, Spirits of the elements, intermediate beings between angels and men, fire and water spirits, dwarfs of the mines, good and evil attendants on individual men-in one word, all sorts of supernatural appearances, and wonderful interferences of invisible beings these, in spite of all that philosophy can do, have taken such a place in the imaginations, and, indeed, in the hearts of men, that their total banishment from thence must for ever remain an impossibility. Every story of that kind, everything that looks like an anecdote from the world of spirits, and in general every attempt to support these fantastic existences, or to remove the grounds on which reason would shun to reject them-is sure of a favourable reception from the most part of mankind. Even the more enlightened among us, persons who would on no account have it said of them that they are serious believers in ghoststories, or in the possibility of the incidents on which such stories turn, even these persons are in common well pleased with an opportunity of chatting over such things in a quiet way, by the fireside. Nay, the philosopher himself, who, with all parade of reasoning, contends against the reality of these appearances on which the ghostscers rest their faith, feels, at times, his own fancy getting the better of his judgment, and has often enough to do to prevent himself from forming the same wish which others would have no hesitation in expressing-the wish,

namely, that the facts of the story-teller might be more closely examined.

A tradition, which is as old as our species, or, at the least, many centuries older than philosophy, has produced, in regard to such things, a sort of universal belief and consent of all nations. From infancy, in whatever quarter of the globe we are born, we are sure to be nourished with the same unvarying provender of tales, dreams, and visions, all connected with this belief; and it acquires over us a power too deep ever entirely to be shaken, at a period when we are not only devoid of any suspiciousness in regard to others, but unprovided by reason with any weapons wherewith to defend ourselves from the assaults of our own credulous imaginations. In a word, as Horace says of Nature in general, "However contemptuously we may toss from us feelings which are common to all men, there are moments in which they creep unperceived into our bosoms; so we are sincerely of opi nion, that the earth does not at this moment contain one single individual who never felt a superstitious shudder in passing a church-yard at midnight, We are equally of opinion, that so long as this feeling, this painful feeling, as to the reality of such things continues, the human mind will continue to receive a tragic pleasure from the skil ful use made of them in works of imagination. And we are farther of opinion, that no reader of taste can go through this book, entitled The Devil's Elixir, without enjoying a great deal of this sort of pleasure. Who is he that hath not known the delightful horror of perusing a book full of ghosts and devils at midnight-the dear shudder with which one turns over the leaf, half-suspecting its rustle to be the approaching footstep of some fearful creature, not of the earth earthy?" If there be any such person, let him congratulate himself-let him hug himself as much and as long as he pleases-we would not purchase his indifference to the pain by giving up our own sensibility to the pleasure of it. We like to be horrified-we delight in Frankenstein-we delight in Grierson of Lagg-we delight in the Devil's Elixir.

We have already hinted, however, that there is one particular idea on which this author, when in his horrible vein, is chiefly delighted to expatiate. This is the idea of what he

calls, in his own language, a doppelganger; that is to say, of a man's being haunted by the visitations of another self-a double of his own personal appearance. We have something not very remote from this conception in certain wraith-stories of our own popular mythology: but either the original German superstitions are much richer in their details of the notion than ours, or La Motte Fouqué, and Hoffmann, have made more of what their country-people's old tales gave them than any of our writers have made of their native materials of a similar kind. In some of their works, the idea is turned to a half-ludicrous use-and very successfully too-but by far the best are those romances in which it has been handled quite seriously-and of all these, the best is the book now before us in an English garb. The superior excellence of the Devil's Elixir lies in the skill with which its author has contrived to mix up the horrible notion of the double-goer, with ordinary human feelings of all kinds. He has linked it with scenes of great and simple pathos-with delineations of the human mind under the influences of not one, but many of its passions-ambition-love-revenge remorse. He has even dared to mix scenes and characters exquisitely ludicrous with those in which his haunted hero appears and acts; and all this he has been able to do without in the smallest degree weakening the horrors which are throughout his corps de reserve. On the contrary, we attribute the unrivalled effect which this work, as a whole, produces on the imagination, to nothing so much as the admirable art with which the author has married dreams to realities, the air of truth which his wildest fantasies draw from the neighbourhood of things which we all feel to be simply and intensely human and true. Banquo's ghost is tenfold horrible, because it appears at a regal banquet—and the horrors of the Monk Medardus affect our sympathies in a similar ratio, because this victim of everything that is fearful in the caprices of an insane imagination, is depicted to us as living and moving among men, women, and scenes, in all of which we cannot help recognizing a certain aspect of life and nature, and occasionally even of homeliness. We shall endeavour to give some very faint noVOL. XVI.

tion (purposely it shall be but such) of the fable, and a specimen or two of the author's style in handling different sorts of themes.

The main idea, then, is this: A certain Italian Prince, having committed a series of the most atrocious crimes, at last enters into a sort of compact with the Fiend, which, however, is never quite completed. The fruit of a horrible amour is his only child: and being seized upon its birth with the most agonizing remorse, he is suffered to purchase his pardon, on the condition that he shall continue to do penance as a wanderer on the face of the earth, until the race to which his guilt has given origin, shall be entirely at an end, and that in the person of some descendant, whose sanctity shall be as remarkable as was the original depravity of his doomed ancestor.

Medardus, the hero of this book, is one of the remote descendants of this Being. The unhappy Ancestor contrives to be near him in his infancy, and strives, in giving a turn the most pious and holy to his earliest imaginations, to lay the foundation of that sanctity of life on which his own peace is to depend. He also, for obvious reasons, desires to have him educated as a monk-and a German monk he becomes. Being a youth of great talent and genius, his ambition is kindled, and he distinguishes himself very much as a popular preacher. This distinction strikes at the corrupted part of his blood, and destroys him. He becomes vain, proud, voluptuous, and, amongst other offences, is induced, by the example of a gay young travelling Count, to swallow part of the Devil's Elixirthat is to say, uncorks a bottle that has for ages been laid up in the reliquiary of the convent under that horrific name. The story was, that the Devil had once tempted St Anthony with this bottle, and that the Saint having seized it from the grasp of the fiend, had bequeathed it to those pious fathers as the trophy of his victory. But it is farther understood that, such is the hellish virtue of the liquor contained in the flask, if any man drink of it, he will of necessity become the victim of all those impure thoughts which were most repugnant from the spotless temperament of St Anthony; and more, that if any two persons drink of it, they will not only become equally victims to these horrid influ

H

ences, but be constrained to bear in the eyes of men a more than twin-like resemblance to each other; while, at the same time, every evil deed of the one shall unconsciously and mysteriously tend to the evil, not of himself merely, but of his guilty Double.

It will naturally be supposed, there fore, that the young travelling Count acts as the Doppel-ganger of the Monk -such is the case: but it is also discovered in the sequel, that the resemblance between them may admit of a natural explanation, since, in point of fact, Victorin the Count, and Medardus the Monk, are both of them the sons of one father. The poor Monk leaves his convent; and these two persons are involved in a long variety of adventures, the eternally intermingling and undistinguishable threads of which we have no intention to attempt untwisting on this occasion. Let it be sufficient to say, that their collision embraces the whole field of human passion that they are rivals in love, in war, in guilt, in misery, and in madness; and that they at last both die childless and repentant, whereby the great knot is unloosed, and the unhappy wanderer allowed to quit the world, of which for centuries he has been weary. Such is the tale: or rather such we understand it to be, for, in truth, Hoffmann has many excellencies, but clearness of narrative is not of the number.

This is quite enough in the way of explanation for we abominate the reviewer who forestalls his author. We shall proceed, therefore, without farther preface, to make a few quotations, simply in order that the reader may satisfy himself as to the energy and masterly skill with which Mr Hoffmann handles his materials of various kinds. As for the translator, we might safely allow one specimen of his performance to speak for itself. His version is not only a faithful, but a highly elegant one; and in addition to all this, the writer has shewn great judgment in omitting certain details which would not have been over acceptable to the English public in its present mood. In a word, he has contrived to prune off all the indelicacy of his German original, without doing the smallest injury to the author's genius; but, on the contrary, to the great and manifest benefit and advantage of the work, in every possible point of view. When we add, that the translator is the same gentle

man whose specimens of scenes versified from some of the modern German dramatists, have long been familiar to the readers of this journal, we have perhaps said more than enough as to this matter. The fact, that this translation comes from such a person, might of itself, indeed, be a sufficient pledge, not only that the translation is well executed, but that the work on which he has chosen to exercise his own graceful talents is no ordinary work.

Imagine, then, the lowly sequestered Monk in his dim cell, and come with us to Hoffmann's picture of the simultaneous wakening up of his genius and his ambition. Nothing, certainly, can be better than the whole of this part of the book is in its way; we are sorry that we must confine ourselves to a mere specimen.

"The eventful holiday soon arrived. The church was unusually crowded, and it was not without considerable trepidation that I mounted the pulpit. At the commencement, I remained timidly faithful to my manuscript; and Leonardus told me that I had spoken with a faltering voice, which, however, exactly corresponded with certain plaintive and pathetic considerations with which I had begun my discourse, and which, therefore, was interpreted by most of my auditors into a very skilful example of rhetorical tact.

"Soon afterwards, however, it seemed as if my inward mind were gradually lighted

up by the glowing fire of supernatural inspiration. I thought no more of the manuscript, but gave myself up to the influence of the moment. I felt how every nerve and fibre was attuned and energized. I heard my own voice thunder through the vaulted roof. I beheld, as if by miracle, the halo of divine light shed around my own elevated head and outstretched arms. By what means I was enabled to preserve connection in my periods, or to deliver my conceptions with any degree of logical precision, I know not, for I was carried out of myself. I could not afterwards have declared whether my discourse had been short or long-the time past like a dream! With a grand euphonical sentence, in which I concentrated, as if into one focus, all the blessed doctrines that I had been announcing, I concluded my sermon; of which

the effect was such as had been in the convent wholly unexampled.

"Long after I had ceased to speak, there were heard through the church the sounds of passionate weeping, exclamations of heartfelt rapture, and audible prayers. The brethren paid me their tribute of the highest approbation. Leonardus embraced me, and named me the pride of their institution !

"With unexampled rapidity my renown was spread abroad; and henceforward, on every Sunday or holiday, crowds of the most respectable inhabitants of the town used to be assembled, even before the doors were opened, while the church, after all, was found insufficient to hold them. By this homage, my zeal was proportionably increased. I endeavoured more and more to give to my periods the proper rounding, and to adorn my discourses throughout, with all the flowers of eloquence. I succeeded always more and more in fettering the attention of my audience, until my fame became such, that the attention paid to me was more like the homage and veneration due to a saint, than approbation bestowed on any ordinary mortal. A kind of religious delirium now prevailed through the town. Even on ordinary week days, and on half-holidays, the inhabitants came in crowds, merely to see Brother Medardus, and to hear him speak, though but a few words.

"Thus vanity gradually, by imperceptible, but sure approaches, took possession of my heart. Almost unconsciously, I began to look upon myself as the one elect,the pre-eminently chosen of Heaven.

"That unaffected cheerfulness and inward serenity which had formerly brightened my existence, was completely banished from my soul. Even all the goodhearted expressions of the Prior, and friendly behaviour of the monks, awoke within me only discontent and resentment. By their mode of conduct, my vanity was bitterly mortified. In me they ought clearly to have recognized the chosen saint who was above them so highly elevated. Nay, they should even have prostrated themselves in the dust, and implored my intercession before the throne of Heaven!

"I considered them, therefore, as beings influenced by the most deplorable obduracy and refractoriness of spirit. Even in my discourses, I contrived to interweave certain mysterious allusions. I ventured to assert, that now a wholly new and mighty revolution had begun, as with the roseate light of morning, to dawn upon the earth, announcing to pious believers, that one of the specially elect of Heaven had been sent for a space to wander in sublunary regions. My supposed mission I continued to clothe in mysterious and obscure imagery, which, indeed, the less it was understood, seemed the more to work like a charm among the people.

"Leonardus now became visibly colder in his manner, avoiding to speak with me, unless before witnesses. At last, one day, when we were left alone in the great allee of the convent garden, he broke out• Brother Medardus, I can no longer conceal from you, that for some time past your whole behaviour has been such as to excite

in me the greatest displeasure. There has arisen in your mind some adverse and hostile principle, by which you have become wholly alienated from a life of pious simplicity. In your discourses there prevails a dangerous obscurity; and from this darkness many things appear ready, if you dared utter them, to start forward, which, if plainly spoken, would effectually separate you and me for ever. To be candidat this moment you bear about with you, and betray that unalterable curse of our sinful origin, by which even every powerful struggle of our spiritual energies is rendered a means of opening to us the realms of destruction, whereinto we thoughtless mortals are, alas! too apt to go astray!

"The approbation, nay, the idolatrous admiration, which has been paid to you by the capricious multitude, who are always in search of novelty, has dazzled you, and you behold yourself in an artificial character, which is not your own, but a deceitful phantom, which will entice you rapidly into the gulf of perdition. Return, then, into yourself, Medardus-renounce the delusion which thus besets and overpowers you! I believe that I thoroughly understand this delusion, at least, I am well aware of its effects. Already have you lost utterly that calmness and complacence of spirit, without which there is, on this earth, no hope of real improvement. Take warning, then, in time! Resist the fiend who besets you! Be once more that good-humoured and open-hearted youth whom with my whole soul I loved!"

"Tears involuntarily flowed from the eyes of the good Prior while he spoke thus. He had taken my hand, but now letting it fall, he departed quickly without waiting for any answer.

"His words had indeed penetrated my heart; but, alas! the impressions that they had left were only those of anger, distrust, and resentment. He had spoken of the approbation, nay, the admiration and respect, which I had obtained by my wonderful talents; and it became but too obvious that only pitiful envy had been the real source of that displeasure, which he so candidly expressed towards me.-Silent, and wrapt up within myself, I remained, at the next meeting of the brethren, a prey to devouring indignation."

We must now be contented to imagine, as we best may, that Medardus has yielded to all manner of temptations, wandered far from his cloister, committed sundry heinous crimes, at the instigation of the real Devil's Elixirs of lust and hate; and that having entirely laid aside his Capuchin character and costume, he is travelling en seigneur, through a remote part of the German empire. His carriage breaks down by night in a forest, and