Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/304

288 engaging, with features "handsome and strongly-marked Italian, and form, though tending to breadth, and rather under the usual stature, yet eminently dignified." The character of the troublous tines to which this fiction belongs, supplies the author with ample opportunities for getting his hero into strange posses. But the interest is mightily abated when we know how sure he is to get out of them, and the very variety of Salathiel's difficulties becomes at last monotonous and wearisome. He is perpetually being taken prisoner, and perpetually setting himself, or being set, at liberty. The way to catch him, is, to Roman and Jew, easy enough; but the way to keep him if undreamed of in their penal philosophy. Nero despatches him to execution, and a masked figure hurries him instead to liberty. Near the Lake of Tiberias he is captured by a body of Roman troopers, and gives them the slip by a ruse of Arab horsemanship. After a two years' durance in an unlighted dungeon, he gropes his subterranean way into a brilliantly illuminated cavern of Cypriote pirates. Onias imprisons him in the upper ward of a stupendous tower, and a boy lets him out of the window in an empty wine-basket. Titus has him fast under trusty lock and key, and a young girl, Naomi, guides him to freedom. Again Onias consigns him to captivity in the Tower of Antonia, in a dungeon undermined and fired by the enemy; and the very means used for his inevitable destruction are those which saved his charmed life, for though the walls collapse, and he is plunged down a chasm, and continues rolling for some moments in a whirl of stones, dust, earth, and smoke, yet, when it subsides, he finds himself lying on the greensward, in noonday, at the bottom of a valley, with the Tower of Antonia covered with the legionaries, five hundred feet above him,—and, as might be expected, he is up and doing again in no time at all.

The management of historical fiction is at all times a matter of nicety and difficulty. We do not think "Salathiel" a triumph of art in this respect. There is either too much or too little history in it. It is neither one thing nor the other. There is something paradoxical in its very starting-point. Why is Salathiel so infinitely affected by the words "Tarry thou till I come," proceeding as they do from the mouth of One in whose divine mission he is not a believer? And then in the evolution of the great drama of Jerusalem's destruction, we have just sufficient adherence to history to make us expect the narration of notorious episodes, inseparably related to the catastrophe, and the introduction of notorious characters, almost essential to the working of the tragedy—in which expectation, however, we find ourselves in error. As a writer of fiction, Dr. Croly was at liberty to use as much and as little of fact as he pleased, always with a due deference to the exigencies of art; and as readers of fiction, we too are at liberty to express our opinion as to the success of his electicism in this respect. And now, having growled ad libitum, let us own, in conclusion, that "Salathiel" is not lacking in features of power and grandeur, in qualities of lofty conception and elaborate fulfilment, such as would do honour to any writer of the age.

The mere fact of its publication in the pages of Blackwood ensured to Dr. Croly's other novel, "Mareton," the advantage of a large, if not an eager, public. It failed to excite the interest which some of its "forbears" and successors, as serial fictions in Old Ebony, have so