ABSTRACT
Mr. Henry Mackenzie has shown talents both for poetry and the drama. His works possess the rare and invaluable property of originality, to which all other qualities are as dust in the balance; and the sources to which he resorts to excite the interest are rendered accessible by a path peculiarly his own. The novels of Mr. Mackenzie, although assuming a more regular and narrative form, are, like The Man of Feeling, rather the history of effects produced on the human mind by a series of events, than the narrative of those events themselves. Variety of character he has introduced sparingly, and has seldom recourse to any peculiarity of incident, availing himself generally of those which may be considered as common property to all writers of romance. He aimed at being the historian of feeling, and has succeeded in the object of his ambition.
