One great cause of this deterioration is the insatiable thirst for novelty, which, becoming weary even of excellence, will “sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey on garbage.”  In the torpidity produced by an utter exhaustion of sensual enjoyment, the Arreoi Club of Otaheite is recorded to have found a miserable excitement, by swallowing the most revolting filth; and the jaded intellectual appetites of more civilized communities will sometimes seek a new stimulus in changes almost as startling.  Some adventurous writer, unable to obtain distinction among a host of competitors, all better qualified than himself to win legitimate applause, strikes out a fantastic or monstrous innovation; and arrests the attention of many who would fall asleep over monotonous excellence.  Imitators are soon found;—­fashion adopts the new folly;—­the old standard of perfection is deemed stale and obsolete;—­and thus, by degrees, the whole literature of a country becomes changed and deteriorated.  It appears to us, that we are now labouring in a crisis of this nature.  In our last Number, we noticed the revolution in our poetry; the transition from the lucid terseness and exquisite polish of Pope and Goldsmith, to the rambling, diffuse, irregular, and imaginative style of composition by which the present era is characterized; and we might have added, that a change equally complete, though diametrically opposite in its tendency, has been silently introduced into our prose.  In this we have oscillated from freedom to restraint;—­from the easy, natural, and colloquial style of Swift, Addison and Steele, to the perpetually strained, ambitious, and overwrought stiffness, of which the author we are now considering affords a striking exemplification.  “He’s knight o’ the shire, and represents them all.”  There is not the smallest keeping in his composition:—­less solicitous what he shall say, than how he shall say it, he exhausts himself in a continual struggle to produce effect by dazzling, terrifying, or surprising.  Annibal Caracci was accused of an affectation of muscularity, and an undue parade of anatomical knowledge, even upon quiescent figures:  But the artist whom we are now considering has no quiescent figures:—­even his repose is a state of rigid tension, if not extravagant distortion.  He is the Fuseli of novelists.  Does he deem it necessary to be energetic, he forthwith begins foaming at the mouth, and falling into convulsions; and this orgasm is so often repeated, and upon such inadequate occasions, that we are perpetually reminded of the tremendous puerilities of the Della Cruscan versifiers, or the ludicrous grand eloquence of the Spaniard, who tore a certain portion of his attire, “as if heaven and earth were coming together.”  In straining to reach the sublime, he perpetually takes that single unfortunate step which conducts him to the ridiculous —­a failure which, in a less gifted author, might afford a wicked amusement to the critic, but which, when united with such undoubted genius as the present work exhibits, must excite a sincere and painful regret in every admirer of talent.