Page:Biographical and critical miscellanies (IA biographicalcrit00presrich).pdf/81

 till their slow and hoarser inspirations showed them to be both asleep. Just then, on changing my position, my head struck against some things which depended from the ceiling of the closet." "It was still dark, but my sleep was at an end, and by a common apparatus (tinder-box?) that lay beside my bed, I could instantly produce a light." "On recovering from deliquium, you found it where it had been dropped." It is unnecessary to multiply examples, which we should not have adverted to at all had not our opinions in this matter been at variance with those of more than one respectable critic. This sort of language is no doubt in very bad taste. It cannot be denied, however, that, although these defects are sufficiently general to give a colouring to the whole of his composition, yet his works afford many passages of undeniable eloquence and rhetorical beauty. It must be remembered, too, that his novels were his first productions, thrown off with careless profusion, and exhibiting many of the defects of an immature mind, which longer experience and practice might have corrected. Indeed, his later writings are recommended by a more correct and natural phraseology, although it must be allowed that the graver topics to which they are devoted, if they did not authorize, would at least render less conspicuous any studied formality and artifice of expression.

These verbal blemishes, combined with defects already alluded to in the development of his plots, but which all relate to the form rather than the fond of his subject, have made our author less