The Eclectic review - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855 edition. Excerpt: ... of this has been the destruction of such plays as Thomson's and Johnson's, and has damaged alike the ' Sardanapalus' of Byron, the ' Excursion' of Wordsworth, and the ' Remorse' of Coleridge. A mass of successive soliloquies, or long set speeches, can no more be confounded with a real conversation than a quantity of dead fagots can be identified with the branches of a living tree all talking to each other through the medium of the same evening wind. This error is carefully or rather unavoidably shunned by Wilson, who seems always to fancy himself (with his Gurney) actually listening to a number of real characters, and simply jotting down notes of their conversation, with something indeed of the hurry, but with all the accuracy, of shorthand. Even ia the longest of his descriptions--and some of them are sufficiently Jong--he seems rushing breathlessly on, like one who expects immediately to be interrupted; and you as well as he feel from the first that the interruption is at hand. His longer sentences never remind you of those roads which stretch on interminably in a straight line, and which so weary the traveller, but rather of those lanes the coming turnings in which are visible all along..Remorselessly does Tickler come in with his sharp scissors, and cut across the richest webs of humour, or pathos, or fancy which North or the Shepherd is weaving. A yawn even is sometimes made to dig a gulf in an elaborate argument, a fierce diatribe, or a brilliant picture; and a description of Homeric vigour is disturbed by a snore from Hogg, such as Homer never uttered even in the deepest of those slumbers which Horace has attributed to him. At the very moment when you are beginning to tremble lest he should become tedious, he shifts the scene, or changes...