Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/445

Rh heeled shoes. Or, if your demand be for the romantic and the superstitious, is there not "The Spectre Bridegroom," and the peerless narrative of "Rip Van Winkle?" Or, should you be of literary predilections, there are the essay on "The Art of Book-making," and the Shakspearean researches in the Boar's Head Tavern, and Stratford-on-Avon. A like miscellaneous character pertains to "Bracebridge Hall," and the same refractive medium of coloured spectacles everywhere occurs. The merry England described, is almost in the state of the old lady in the ballad, market-bound, egg-laden, and sleepily recubans sub tegmine fagi, to whom, locked in dreamland, "there came by a pedlar, and his name was Stout, and he cut her petticoats all round about;" so that when the matron recovered her consciousness, it was (Hibernicè) not to know herself, and to infer from the new guise of her scant classic drapery that her personal (Teutonicè) had evaporated, or transmigrated, or disintegrated itself in some ineffable fashion, precipitating this ineffable residuum or result. Geoffrey Crayon has played more amiable but equally revolutionary pranks on "merry England," adorning her in vestments so out of date (alas!), and so dreamily fictitious, that she fails to recognise in the glass even the general resemblance. He has painted her, not as the sun paints portraits, with harsh and unflattering fidelity, blackening every frown, deepening every furrow, indenting every crow's foot, but rather as the sentimental artist, who has a soul above accuracy, and who groups together prosy people in poetic attitudes, after the manner of the family piece in the "Vicar of Wakefield." These Yorkshire squires and villagers are but demi-semi-realities. They are mostly too good to be true. The angularities of the originals are too much smoothed down, their crooked ways made straight, and their rough places plain. Distance seems to lend enchantment to the view, and a dreamy haze to soften the vision. Be it far from us, nevertheless, to rail at the sketcher's kindly idealism; nor ever can his book be other than dear to us while we remember in it a Ready-Money Jack, and a Tom Slingsby the schoolmaster, or recal that substantial, drab-breeched, top-booted mystery, the Stout Gentleman in No. 13. Nor must we omit allusion to that august widow, Lady Lillycraft, tender-hearted, romantic, and fond of ease—living on white meats, and little ladylike dishes—cherishing the intimacy of pet dogs, Angola cats, and singing birds—an insatiable novel-reader, though she maintains that there are no novels now-a-days equal to "Pamela" and "Sir Charles Grandison," and that the "Castle of Otranto" is at the head of all romances. Old Christy, too, and Mrs. Hannah, merit a passing salutation—a couple as evidently formed to be linked together as ever were pepper-box and vinegar-cruet. The story of "Dolph Heyliger" glides on with sprightly ease.

Next, we come to the "Tales of a Traveller." Comparatively, it is a well-known truth, they were a failure. Mr. Irving's rambling among the forests of Germany and the plains of Italy provided him with copious matériel for legendary lore; but the critics decided that of this matériel he did not mtd^e the most Notwithstanding his advantages, he might have written the tales, it was averred, without being a traveller at all; instead of spending three years on them, he might have finished the thing in three months, without stirring out of London. The ghost stories, it was alleged, were some of them old, and nearly all badly told—that is,