Page:Female Portrait Gallery.pdf/5



time immediately preceding that of Sir Walter Scott may be likened to the thirty years' drought in Cyprus, during which, as an old historian says, the earth had neither green nor bloom, and the heavens seemed made of brass. The brilliant age of Pope, the wittiest in our language, had left only a cold reflection—poetry was no more, and with it had perished the animating influence it exercises over prose. The fictions put forth were of the lowest order. A castle, a ghost, an improbable villain, an impossible hero, a heroine and a harp, were the joint-stock of romances; while novels of manners were, if they could be so, still less like real life. Nothing could be more insipid than the rakes reformed in the third volume, unless it were the ladies, all loveliness and