PUBLISHER'S ADVERTISEMENT. The Edinburgh Review of January, 1839, contains a long and profound article on the works and character of the author of "Headlong Hall," from which the following full length is taken. “A wandering and contemplative turn of mind; a patient conviction of the vanity of all human conclusions; an impatient sense of the absurdity of all human pretensions, quickened by an habitual suspicion of their insincerity; an eye and · a heart open enough to impressions and opinions of all kinds, so that vanity be the end of all; a perception of the strangeness and mystery which involves our life,-keen enough to enliven the curiosity, but not to disturb or depress the spirit; with faith in some possible but unattainable solution just sufficient to make him watch with interest the abortive endeavours of more sanguine men, but not to engage him in the pursuit himself; a questioning, not a denying spirit,--but questioning without waiting for an answer; an understanding very quick and bright,—not narrow in its range, though wanting in the depth which only deeper purposes can impart; a fancy of singular play and delicacy; a light spmpathy with the common hopes and fears, joys and sorrows of mankind, which gives him an interest in their occupations, just enough for the purposes of observation and intelligent amusement; a poetical faculty, not of a very high order, but quite capable of harmonizing the scattered notes of fancy and observation, and reproducing them in a grateful whole; such, if we have read him rightly, are the dispositions and faculties with which he has been turned forth into this bustling world of speculation, enterprise, imposture, and credulity, with its multiplying spawn of cant, quackery, and pretension;-such the original constitution which seems to point out as his natural and genial vocation the hue and cry after folly in its grave disguises; the philosophy of irreverence and incredulity; the light and bloodless warfare, between jest and earnest, against all new doctrines, accepted or proclaimed for acceptance, clamorously hailed by the many, or maintained in defiant complacency by the self-constituted fit and few." The satirical force and interest of such a book, reflecting every shade and variety of opinion of the NINETEENTH CENTURY, will be felt in a country where every ism is fully developed, where the old Latin proverb may be literally applied, "So many men, so many opinions." There is scarcely a topic upon which men have thought and written in this much vexed age which is not here embodied and set forth; every one has his hobby, and rides it at full tilt, while the author stands by, like the man conducting the whirligig at the fair, setting all in motion, apparently indifferent to either. |