Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/302

286

It were libellous to say there are no other such examples of the simply pathetic and tenderly natural in the author's volumes of verse, but there are not many such, so far as our judgment and memory will serve.

From his doings in minstrelsy, turn we to his doings in prose fiction. Most people have heard of "Salathiel," but not many have read it. The reputation which it ensured its author was wide, and emphatic, but it was of a hearsay kind. Men pronounced the story of the Jew a work of genius, and Dr. Croly a distinguished writer, but they wisely confined their admiration to the safe platitudes of general terms, and abstained from asking one another, Have you read "Salathiel?" To have solicited their special opinion on the character of Sabat the Ismaelite, or the description of Rome in flames, and the "Christians to the lions!" would speedily and sadly have reduced them to a nonplus. How often does the same principle hold good in the circles of the fashionable reading world! Even the popularity of the most popular, were it carefully analysed, might show such an absence of the elements of intelligence and actual sympathy as would considerably disgust the object of it. The voice of the multitude is not the most trustworthy of guarantees for immortality—too frequently it illustrates the scornful lines of old Horace in the French tragedy:While, then, we are not prepared to say that "Salathiel" deserved mere popularity, we think that it deserved more readers. What a magnificent theme, even though a trite and faded one, that of the Wandering Jew! What scope for a soaring imagination, what background for a glowing fancy, in the story of the mortal immortal, the "everlasting" stranger upon earth, the unresting, undying one! And here meets us a fault in Dr. Croly's romance. Beyond a page or two at the beginning and the end of his fiction, there is positively no connexion between Salathiel and