Indeed, such a catastrophe would not have been alien to the genius of Mr Maturin, who, in the present, as well as in former publications, has shown some desire to wield the wand of the enchanter, and to call in the aid of supernatural horrors. While De Courcy was in the act of transferring his allegiance from Eva to Zaira, the phantom of the former, her wraith—as we call in Scotland the apparition of a living person-glides past him, arrayed ir white, with eyes closed, and face pale and colourless, and is presently afterwards seen lying beneath his feet as he assists Zaira into the carriage. Eva has a dream, corresponding to the apparition in all its circumstances. This incident resembles one which we have read in our youth in Aubrey, Baxter, or some such savoury and sapient collector of ghost-stories; but we chiefly mention it, to introduce a remarkable alteration in the tragedy of Bertram, adopted by the author, we believe, with considerable regret. It consists in the retrenchment of a passage or two of great poetical beauty, in which Bertram is represented as spurred to the commission of his great crimes, by the direct agency of a supernatural and malevolent being. We have been favoured with a copy of the lines by a particular friend and admirer of the author, to whom he presented the manuscript copy of his play, in which alone they exist. The Prior, in his dialogue with Bertram, mentions

"the dark knight of the forest,

So from his armour named and sable helm,
Whose unbarred vizor mortal never saw.

He dwells alone; no earthly thing lives near him,
Save the hoarse raven croaking o'er his towers,
And the dank weeds muffling his stagnant moat.

Bertram. I'll ring a summons on his barred portal
Shall make them through their dark valves rock and ring.
Prior. Thou'rt mad to take the quest.

One solitary man did venture there

Within my memory

Dark thoughts dwelt with him, which he sought to vent.
Unto that dark compeer we saw his steps,

In winter's stormy twilight, seek that pass→→

But days and years are gone, and he returns not.
Bertram. What fate befel him there?

Prior. The manner of his end was never known.

Bertram. That man shall be my mate-Contend not with me→→→→ Horrors to me are kindred and society.

Or man, or fiend, he hath won the soul of Bertram.

Bertram is afterwards discovered alone, wandering near the fatal tower, and describes the effect of the awful interview which he had courted.

Bertram. Was it a man or fiend?- Whate'er it was

It hath dwelt wonderfully with me-

All is around his dwelling suitable;

The invisible blast to which the dark pines groan,

The unconscious tread to which the dark earth echoes,

The hidden waters rushing to their fall,

These sounds of which the causes are not seen

I love, for they are like my fate mysterious

How tower'd his proud form through the shrouding gloom,
How spoke the eloquent silence of its motion,
How through the barred vizor did his accents
Roll their rich thunder on their pausing soul!
And though his mailed hand did shun my grasp,
And though his closed morion hid his feature,
Yea, all resemblance to the face of man,
I felt the hollow whisper of his welcome,
I felt those unseen eyes were fix'd on mine,
If eyes indeed were there-

Forgotten thoughts of evil, still-born mischiefs,
Foul fertile seeds of passion and of crime,
That wither'd in my heart's abortive core,
Rous'd their dark battle at his trumpet-peal.

So sweeps the tempest o'er the slumbering desert,
Waking its myriad hosts of burning death :

So calls the last dread peal the wandering atoms
Of blood and bone and flesh and dust-worn fragments,

In dire array of ghastly unity,

To bide the eternal summons-

I am not what I was since I beheld him--
I was the slave of passion's ebbing sway-
All is condensed, collected. callous now-
The groan, the burst, the fiery flash is o'er,
Down pours
the dense and darkening lava-tide,
Arresting life and stilling all beneath it.

Enter two of his band observing him.

First Robber. Sees't thou with what a step of pride he stalks.-Thou hast the dark knight of the forest seen;

For never man, from living converse come,

Trod with such step or flash'd with eye like thine.

Second Robber. And hast thou of a truth seen the dark knight? Bertram (turning on him suddenly). Thy hand is chill'd with fear-Well! shivering craven,

Say I have seen him-wherefore dost thou gaze ?
Long'st thou for tale of goblin-guarded portal ?
Of giant champion whose spell-forged mail
Crumbled to dust at sound of magic horn-
Banner of sheeted flame whose foldings shrunk
To withering weeds that o'er the battlements
Wave to the broken spell-or demon-blast
Of winded clarion whose fell summons sinks

To lonely whisper of the shuddering breeze

O er the charm'd towers

First Robber. Mock me not thus-Hast met him of a truth? Bertram. Well, fool

First Robber. Why then heaven's benison be with you. Upon this hour we part-farewell for ever.

For mortal cause I bear a mortal weapon

But man that leagues with demons lacks not man."

The description of the fiend's port and language, -the effect which the conference with him produces upon Bertram's mind,—the terrific dignity with which the, intercourse with such an associate

invests him, and its rendering him a terror even to his own desperate banditti,—is all well conceived, and executed in a grand and magnificent strain of poetry; and, in the perusal, supposing the reader were carrying his mind back to the period when such intercourse between mortals and demons was considered as matter of indisputable truth, the story acquires probability and consistency, even from that which is in itself not only improbable but impossible. The interview with the incarnate fiend of the forest, would, in these days, be supposed to have the same effect upon the mind of Bertram, as the "metaphysical aid" of the witches produces upon that of Macbeth, awakening and stimulating that appetite for crime, which slumbered in the bosom of both, till called forth by supernatural suggestion. At the same time, while we are happy to preserve a passage of such singular beauty and power, we approve of the taste which retrenched it in action. The suadente diabolo is now no longer a phrase even in our indictments; and we fear his Satanic Majesty, were he to appear on the stage in modern times, would certainly incur the appropriate fate of damnation.

1 ["I take some credit to myself," says Lord Byron, "for having done my best to bring out Bertram. Walter Scott was the first who mentioned Maturin, which he did to me with great recommendation in 1815. Maturin sent his Bertram, and a letter without his address, so that at first I could give him no answer. When I at last hit upon his residence. I sent him a favourable answer, and something more substantial." Bertram was successful. But Mr Maturin's second dramatic attempt proved a failure. Lord Byron terms Manuel "the absurd work of a

To return to the present work. We observe, with pleasure, that Mr Maturin has put his genius under better regulation than in his former publications, and retrenched that luxuriance of language, and too copious use of ornament, which distinguishes the authors and orators of Ireland, whose exuberance of imagination sometimes places them in the predicament of their honest countryman, who complained of being run away with by his legs This excessive indulgence of the imagination is proper to a country where there is more genius than taste, and more copiousness than refinement of ideas. But it is an error to suffer the weeds to rush up with the grain, though their appearance may prove the richness of the soil. There is a time when an author should refrain, like Job, " even from good words-though it should be pain to him.”—And although we think Mr Maturin has reformed that error indifferently well, in his present work, we do pray him, in his future compositions, to reform it altogether. For the rest, we dismiss him with our best wishes, and not without hopes that we may again meet him in the maze of fiction, since, although he has threatened, like Prospero, to break his wand, we have done our poor endeavour to save his book from being burned.

clever man," and, "with the exception of a few capers, as heavy a nightmare as ever bestrode indigestion."]