The Christian Remembrancer; Or, the Churchman's Biblical, Ecclesiastical & Literary Miscellany (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 60 Aut. III.?Ettore Fieramosca, o Lit Disfida di Barlelia, racconto ili Massimo D'AzEGLio. Parigi: Baudrv, Librcria Europea, 1848. In our July number, 1848, we called the attention of our readers to the Italian novels, and to those of D'Azeglio in particular, and we are tempted to resume the subject. Our reason is this; we consider the best of them to embody, more than any with which we are acquainted, our conception of what a perfect novel should be. We have always agreed with those, who rank the novel of character as the highest achievement in the department of fiction. In the luxury of the deepest seclusion, without any acute perception of the springs of human action, and, above all, without any minute observation of the manifold changes which they exhibit in the outward frame-work of society, an imaginative mind may dream a scries of adventures, which shall chain us for a time in rapt attention, or hurry us on in breathless suspense till the catastrophe has broken the charm. But to such works we rarely return; we do not seek in them the lessons of wisdom and experience. They neither teach us to observe, nor, for any beneficial purpose, to feel. In fact they are mere creations of the fancy. They have no hold upon the heart. It was doubtless the sense of this defect which gave rise to what mny be called the novel of analysis, whose principal aim is a keen and minute dissection of the feelings and motives of the heart. These are, from time to time, laid open with consummate skill in a series of metaphysical disquisitions, but they have little to do with the world as it is. Such novels have little action and no manners. The characters, if characters they may be called, have no individuality. They are described, not shown. If their actions tell, their conversations never d...