After this, let us no longer smile at the furious hyperboles of Della Crusca upon Mrs. Robinson’s eyes.  In the same strain we are told of a convent whose “walls sweat, and its floors quiver,” when a contumacious brother treads them;—­and when the parents of the same personage are torn from his room by the Director of the convent, we are informed that “the rushing of their robes as he dragged them out, seemed like the whirlwind that attends the presence of the destroying angel.”  In a similar spirit, of pushing every thing to extremes when he means to be impressive, the author is sometimes offensively minute; as when he makes the aforesaid persecuted monk declare, that “the cook had learned the secret of the convent (that of tormenting those whom they had no longer hopes of commanding), and mixed the fragments he threw to me with ashes, hair, and dust;”—­and sometimes the extravagance of his phrases becomes simply ludicrous.  Two persons are trying to turn a key—­“It grated, resisted; the lock seemed invincible.  Again we tried with cranched teeth, indrawn breath, and fingers stripped almost to the bone—­in vain.”  And yet, after they had almost stripped their fingers to the bone, they succeed in turning that which they could not move when their hands were entire.

We have said that Mr. Maturin had contrived to render his work as objectionable in the matter as in the manner; and we proceed to the confirmation of our assertion.  We do not arraign him solely for the occasional indecorousness of his conceptions, or the more offensive tone of some of his colloquies, attempted to be palliated by the flimsy plea, that they are, appropriate in the mouths that utter them.  Dr. Johnson, as a proof of the total suppression of the reasoning faculty in dreams, used to cite one of his own, wherein he imagined himself to be holding an argument with an adversary, whose superior powers filled him with a mortification which a moment’s reflection would have dissipated, by reminding him that he himself supplied the repartees of his opponent as well as his own.  In his waking dreams, Mr. Maturin is equally the parent of all the parties who figure in his Romance; and, though not personally responsible for their sentiments, he is amenable to the bar of criticism for every phrase or thought which transgresses the bounds of decorum, or violates the laws that regulate the habitual intercourse of polished society.  It is no defence to say, that profane or gross language is natural to the characters whom he embodies.  Why does he select such?  It may be proper in them; but what can make it proper to us?  There are wretches who never open their lips but to blaspheme; but would any author think himself justified in filling his page with their abominations?  It betrays a lamentable deficiency of tact and judgment, to imagine, as the author of Melmoth appears to do, that he may seize upon nature in her most unhallowed or disgusting moods, and dangle her in the eyes of a decorous and