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 knowledge, by fastening his attention on the results, to the exclusion of the insignificant means by which they are achieved. He will not always find this an easy matter.

But to return from this rambling digression: in the following year, 1799, Brown published his second novel, entitled Ormond. The story presents few of the deeply agitating scenes and powerful bursts of passion which distinguish the first. It is designed to exhibit a model of surpassing excellence in a female rising superior to all the shocks of adversity and the more perilous blandishments of seduction, and who, as the scene grows darker and darker around her, seems to illumine the whole with the radiance of her celestial virtues. The reader is reminded of the "patient Griselda," so delicately portrayed by the pencils of Boccaccio and Chaucer. It must be admitted, however, that the contemplation of such a character in the abstract is more imposing than the minute details by which we attain to the knowledge of it; and although there is nothing, we are told, which the gods looked down upon with more satisfaction than a brave mind struggling with the storms of adversity, yet, when these come in the guise of poverty and all the train of teasing annoyances in domestic life, the tale, if long protracted, too often produces a sensation of weariness scarcely to be compensated by the moral grandeur of the spectacle.

The appearance of these two novels constitutes an epoch in the ornamental literature of America,