The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting malice is in a certain sense more interesting:  and that not merely because it is much shorter. Aretina or The Serious Romance, opens with an “apology for Romances” generally, which goes far to justify Dryden’s high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic.  But it cannot be said to be much—­it is a little—­more interesting as a story than Parthenissa, and it is written in a most singular lingo—­not displaying the racy quaintness of Mackenzie’s elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather terrible to peruse.  A library is “a bibliotheck richly tapestried with books.”  Somebody possesses, or is compared to “a cacochymick stomach, which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour.”  And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and “pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in Death’s livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of that nasty prison.”  A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages:  and though the lives of Aretina and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be thought likely—­though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit—­it is more certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of the world, nor the man to walk in that way.

Pandion and Amphigeneia is the inferior in importance of both these books.  Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit him with, but he does not show it here.  I think Sir Walter Raleigh is quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the Arcadia:  and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney’s scheme—­which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any form definitely settled by its author—­with none of the merits of his ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.

The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency.  It was not a genuine kind at all:  but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations—­a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back.  It was true to no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought.  Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another—­the Greek romance—­was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period of the literature to which it belonged.  The pure mediaeval romance of chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left.  The Amadis class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, in increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive.  Impotence and sterility in every sense could but be