he would surrender himself to the melting mood of the passion, in the musings of pensive retirement. But this was not the way. He must exile himself for successive years from her society and vicinity, and every soft indulgence of feeling, and rush boldly into all sorts of hardships and perils, deeming no misfortune so great as not to find constant occasions of hazarding his life among the roughest foes, or, if he could find or fancy them, the strangest monsters; and all this, not as the alleviation of despair, but as the courtship of hope. And when he was at length betrayed to flatter himself that such a probation, through every kind of patience and danger, might entitle him to throw his trophies and himself at her imperial feet, it was very possible she might be affronted at his having presumed to be still alive. It is unnecessary to refer to the other parts of the institution of chivalry, the whole system of which would seem more adapted to any race of beings exhibited in the Arabian Nights, or to any still wilder creation of fancy, than to a community of creatures appointed to live by cultivating the soil, anxious to avoid pain and trouble, seeking the reciprocation of affection on the easiest terms, and nearest to happiness in regular pursuits and quiet domestic life.

One cannot help reflecting here, how amazingly accommodating this human nature has been to all institutions but wise and good ones; insomuch that an order of life and manners conceived in the wildest deviation from all plain sense and native instinct, could be practically adopted. by some of those who had rank and courage enough, and adored and envied by the rest of mankind. Still, the genuine tendencies of nature have survived the strange but transient sophistications of time, and remain the same after the age of chivalry is gone far toward that oblivion, to which you will not

fail to wish that many other institutions might speedily follow it. Forgive the prolixity of these illustrations intended to show, that schemes and speculations respecting the interests either of an individual or of society, which are inconsistent with the natural constitution of man, may, except where it should be reasonable to expect some supernatural intervention, be denominated romantic.

The tendency to this species of romance, may be caused, or very greatly promoted, by an exclusive taste for what is grand, a disease with which some few minds are affected. They have no pleasure in contemplating the system of things as the Creator has ordered it, a combination of great and little, in which the great is much more dependent on the little, than the little on the great. They cut out the grand objects, to dispose them into a world of their own. All the images in their intellectual scene must be colossal and mountainous. They are constantly seeking what is animated into heroics, what is expanded into immensity, what is elevated above the stars. But for great empires, great battles, great enterprises, great convulsions, great geniuses, great temples, great rivers, there would be nothing worth naming in this part of the creation.* All that belongs to connexion, gradation, harmony, regularity, and utility, is thrown out of sight behind these forms of vastness. The influence of this exclusive taste will reach into the system of projects and expectations. The man will wish to summon the world to throw aside its tame accustomed pursuits, and adopt at once more magnificent views and objects, and will be indignant at mankind that they

Just as, to employ a humble comparison, a votary of fashion, after visiting a crowded public place which happened at that time not to be graced by the presence of many people of consequence, tells you, with an affected tone, "There was not a creature there.".

cannot or will not be sublime. Impatient of little mean and slow processes, he will wish for violent transitions and entirely new institutions. He will perhaps determine to set men the example of performing something great, in some ill-judged sanguine project in which he will fail; and, after being ridiculed by society, both for the scheme and its catastrophe, may probably abandon all the activities of life, and become a misanthrope the rest of his days. At any rate, he will disdain all labour to perform well in little or moderate things, when fate has frowned on his higher ambition.

LETTER III.

ONE of the most obvious distinctions of the works of romance is, an utter violation of all the relations between ends and means. Sometimes such ends are proposed as seem quite dissevered from means, inasmuch as there are scarcely any supposable means on earth to accomplish them but no matter; if we cannot ride we must swim, if we cannot swim we must fly; the object is effected by a mere poetical omnipotence that wills it. And very often practicable objects are attained by means the most fantastic, improbable, or inadequate; so that there is scarcely any resemblance between the method in which they are accomplished by the dexterity of fiction, and that which we are condemned to follow if we will attempt the same things in the actual economy of the world. Now, when you see this absurdity of imagination prevailing in the calculations of real life, you may justly apply the epithet

-romantic.

Indeed a strong and habitually indulged imagination may be absorbed in the end, if it be not a concern of

absolute immediate urgency, as for a while quite to forget the process of attainment. That power has incantations to dissolve the rigid laws of time and distance, and place a man in something so like the presence of his object, as to create the temporary hallucination of an ideal possession; and it is hard, when occupying the verge of Paradise, to be flung far back in order to find or make a path to it, with the slow and toilsome steps of reality. In the luxury of promising himself that what he wishes will by some means take place at some time, he forgets that he is advancing no nearer to it-except on the wise and patient calculation that he must, by the simple fact of growing older, be coming somewhat nearer to every event that is yet to happen to him. He is like a traveller, who, amidst his indolent musings in some soft bower, where he has sat down to be shaded a little while from the rays of noon, falls asleep, and dreams he is in the midst of all the endearments of home, insensible that there are many hills and dales for him yet to traverse. But the traveller will awake; so too will our other dreamer; and if he has the smallest capacity of just reflection he will regret to have wasted in reveries the time which ought to have been devoted to practical exertions.

But even though reminded of the necessity of intervening means, the man of imagination will often be tempted to violate their relation with ends, by permitting himself to dwell on those happy casualties, which the prolific sorcery of his mind will promptly figure to him as the very things, if they would but occur, to ac complish his wishes at once, without the toil of a sober process. If they would occur-and things as strange might and do happen: he reads in the newspapers that an estate of ten thousand per annum was lately adjudged to a man who was working on the road. He has even

heard of people dreaming that in such a place something valuable was concealed; and that, on searching or digging that place, they found an old earthen pot, full of gold and silver pieces of the times of good King Charles the Martyr. Mr. B. was travelling by the mailcoach, in which he met with a most interesting young lady whom he had never seen before; they were mutually delighted, and were married in a few weeks. Mr. C., a man of great merit in obscurity, was walking across a field when Lord D., in chase of a fox, leaped over the hedge and fell off his horse into a ditch. Mr C. with the utmost alacrity and kind solicitude helped his lordship out of the ditch, and recovered for him his escaped horse. The consequence was inevitable; his lordship, superior to the pride of being mortified to have been seen in a condition so unlucky for giving the im pression of nobility, commenced a friendship with Mr. C., and introduced him into honourable society and the road to fortune. A very ancient maiden lady of a large fortune happening to be embarrassed in a crowd, a young clergyman offered her his arm and politely attended her home; this attention so captivated her, that she bequeathed and soon after left him her whole estate —though she had many poor relations.

That class of fictitious works called novels, though much more like real life than the romances which preceded, is yet full of these lucky incidents and adventures, which are introduced as the chief means toward the ultimate success. A young man, without fortune, for instance, is precluded from making his addresses to a young female in a superior situation, whom he believes not indifferent to him, until he can approach her with such worldly advantages as it might not be imprudent or degrading for her to cast a look upon. Now how is this to be accomplished?-Why,