Page:Biographical and critical miscellanies (IA biographicalcrit00presrich).pdf/65

 dislocations and general improbabilities of the narrative. Our author was led into these defects by the unpardonable precipitancy of his composition. Three of his romances were thrown off in the course of one year. These were written with the printer's devil literally at his elbow, one being begun before another was completed, and all of them before a regular, well-digested plan was devised for their execution.

The consequences of this curious style of doing business are such as might have been predicted. The incidents are strung together with about as little connexion as the rhymes in "the House that Jack built;" and the whole reminds us of some bizarre, antiquated edifice, exhibiting a dozen styles of architecture, according to the caprice or convenience of its successive owners.

The reader is ever at a loss for a clew to guide him through the labyrinth of strange, incongruous incident. It would seem as if the great object of the author was to keep alive the state of suspense, on the player's principle, in the "Rehearsal," that "on the stage it is best to keep the audience in suspense; for to guess presently at the plot or the sense tires them at the end of the first act. Now here every line surprises you, and brings in new matter!" Perhaps, however, all this proceeds less from calculation than from the embarrassment which the novelist feels in attempting a solution of his own riddles, and which leads him to put off the reader, by multiplying incident after incident, until