ABSTRACT
Mr. Collins has succeeded better in his romance of the fifth century than might have been expected from his previous training as a biographical writer, or the choice of a theme so remote from our own experience, and an age of whose manners few pictures have been preserved. Indeed, this latter difficulty is rather evaded by the style of composition than overcome. Mr. Collins is a follower of the school of Chateaubriand and Bulwer; possessing many of their merits, but with the inherent defects of the rhetorical style. Everything is pictured in too high a key…. For a brief space this artificial manner is striking, but for a long spell the reader desires the repose, the congruity, the variety of nature. In the rhetorical school, the narrative stalks on stilts; the descriptions have too much of the glare and mannerism of the scenepainter; the motives and emotions of the characters partake too much of ‘King Cambyses’ vein’; and the dialogue itself has too unvarying a strain of grandiloquence. Nature and the subject are both made subservient to the composition of the writer: usually there is not the thing but the rhetorician’s exaggeration. There is, too, a tendency to stop the story for reflections, with a disposition to resort to startling contrast, strong effects, and glitter; not only ‘o’erstepping the modesty of Nature’, but tricking her out for the claptrap of the stage. When freshly taken, or only read by sections, all this, as we have just observed, is very striking; but it palls in continuance: to which the uniform and artificial character of the style contribute. The reader is tired, not so much by writing, as by ‘composition’.
