Page:The Ladies' Cabinet of Fashion, Music & Romance 1832.pdf/57

Rh cessive images of events, be they true or false, faithfully related, or fancifully imagined. And Fancy wins the day against Truth. While her severer sister is besieging, by gradual approaches, the reason, Fancy has already enlisted the feelings, and subdued the soul. " Give '-so exclaimed the me but the writing of the national ballads"shrewdest statesman England ever saw-" give me but the writing of the national ballads, and I care not who has the framing of the laws. ” Let us allow something for the point of the apothegm, and in substance it is not without truth. His power who legislates for the fancy, is greater than his who enacts statutes for the conduct; as much greater as the warm impulses of the heart are stronger than the cold dictates of the understanding. " These things ought not so to be," will some one say. They are so. More-in our day and generation at the least, they will be so. No man, not even he who so long regulated the lever that now-a-days decides the march of armies and the motions of the political world- not Rothschild himself exerted, during the last twenty years, as home-felt an influence over civilized Europe as did Walter Scott. In the propensity, then, which lies at the root of the Great Novelist's sway, we recognise an instinct, powerful beyond law or statute, universal without limit of race or clime. It is injurious, illegitimate. Is it ? The proof. It may be perverted. And what human instinct cannot ? It has been notoriously perverted. True. A parent may as innocently permit his child to swallow an intoxicating draught of ardent spirits, as suffer its mind to be poisoned, and its nerves unstrung, by drinking in the panic terrors that breathe from Mrs. Radcliffe's foolishly-horrible pages. But it is peculiarly liable to perversion. Perhaps it is. The sharpest tool inflicts the deepest wound ; yet that is a poor argument in favour of using a dull one. All this is aside from what, in this utilitarian age of ours , will be admitted as the main question. Is the medium of imaginative narration a legitimate, as it is a powerful, instrument in the formation of character ? Of the influence of Moral Fictions, it is not within my present purpose to speak. If it were, might I not safely challenge the production of a homily, or a code of maxims, or a set of moral precepts, to match, in influence, the noble lessons taught in " Helen ?" But I leave to others the task of inquiring whether Seneca or Maria Edgeworth has the more