or something super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural.  And if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized:  but even in the describing of real and every day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature—­show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy,—­than a great genius in his “maddest fits,” as Withers somewhere calls them.  We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane’s novels,—­as they existed some twenty or thirty years back,—­those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms,—­whether he has not found his brain more “betossed,” his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue—­where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street—­a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser.  In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive:—­we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened.  In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their “whereabout.”  But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground.  The one turns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences.  By what subtile art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours—­with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream—­that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy,—­is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his widest seeming-aberrations.