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 style. He bestowed great pains on the formation of it; but, in our opinion, without great success, at least in his novels. It has an elaborate, factitious air, contrasting singularly with the general simplicity of his taste and the careless rapidity of his composition. We are aware, indeed, that works of imagination may bear a higher flush of colour, a poetical varnish, in short, that must be refused to graver and more studied narrative. No writer has been so felicitous in reaching the exact point of good taste in this particular as Scott, who, on a groundwork of prose, may be said to have enabled his readers to breathe an atmosphere of poetry. More than one author, on the other hand, as Florian, in French, for example, and Lady Morgan, in English, in their attempts to reach this middle region, are eternally fluttering on the wing of sentiment, equally removed from good prose and good poetry.

Brown, perhaps willing to avoid this extreme, has fallen into the opposite one, forcing his style into unnatural vigour and condensation. Unusual and pedantic epithets, and elliptical forms of expression, in perpetual violation of idiom, are resorted to at the expense of simplicity and nature. He seems averse to telling simple things in a simple way. Thus, for example, we have such expressions as these: "I was fraught with the persuasion that my life was endangered." "The outer door was ajar. I shut it with trembling eagerness, and drew every bolt that appended to it." "His brain seemed to swell beyond its continent." "I waited