DICK TURPIN. 



Another whifFof the short pipe: 



" I rode till I came to the powder mill, 

 Where the smell of my pops made him soon stand still. 

 ' My mare wants a new saddle-cloth/ said I 

 * Permit me the cape of your coat to try, 



For I am Dick Turpin, that mischievous blade.' 

 And thus, for the present, we leave him O rare Dick Turpin !" 



We had intended to have quoted largely from the ride to York, 

 which is done in such glorious style; but all the daily and weekly 

 press have anticipated our intentions. There are many other good 

 things, however, to which we can help ourselves ; and we shall do so 

 presently. And, although we have descanted so " lengthily," as the 

 Yankees say, -on the subject of Turpin, let it not be supposed that 

 the wild and lawless feats of the highwaymen form the prominent 

 features of" Rookwood." In no degree ! Some of the most pathetic 

 and tender passages of our modern romantic literature may be found 

 in the story of Sybil, whom we have heard likened (unjustly, we 

 think), with Esmeralda. Nothing vapid or flimsy, or what the 

 Cocknies call, in their wish to combine these qualities, sentimental, is 

 to be found here. It is all manly, and true. This is praise as rare 

 as it is just. 



Our modern writers mistake the matter altogether the writers 

 of criticism as well as the writers of fiction. The romance of our day 

 is not the romance of Monk Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe, or Maturin. It is 

 no such thing. Our modern romance, as shewn forth in the work of 

 Mr. Ainsworth, as also in the writings of Victor Hugo, and the 

 highest aspirants of the French school, is a romance, not of 

 verbiage, but of action, passion, and irrepressible tenderness. And 

 this is undoubtedly a vast progression in the art. It is the sub- 

 stitution of poetic truth for fanciful fiction of earnest power for ob- 

 jectless aspiration. The new romances may have the old supernatural 

 machinery the old horrors but where, we should like to know, are 

 the startling dramatic effects, the high-wrought, passionate situation, 

 which keep us on a rack of anxiety and doubt ? where the poetry, 

 the vitality, and the taste, displayed in the new school, to be met with 

 in the old ? Certainly not in Mrs. Radcliffe or Monk Lewis. Ma- 

 turin had something better about him. He was the precursor of the 

 present school ; and we much doubt if Victor Hugo, whom we know to 

 be an ardent admirer of " Melmoth," is not indebted to him for many 

 of his most forcible conceptions. At the same time, Maturin had not 

 refined upon his own notions, as has been since done. Hoffman and the 

 German fantastical school, the modern French romancers, and the old 

 English dramatists, are the groundwork of Mr. Ainsworth's school 

 of romance. Shelley has remarked, " that it is impossible any 

 one who inhabits the same age with such writers as those who stand 

 in the foremost ranks of our own, can conscientiously assure himself 

 that his language and tone of thought may not have been modified 

 by the study of the productions of those extraordinary intellects. It 

 is true that not the spirit but the forms in which it has manifested 

 itself are due less to the peculiarities of their own minds than to the 

 peculiarity of the moral and intellectual condition of the minds among 



