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He repairs to the mansion of a venerable old Swiss gentleman, a friend of his father, delightfully situated in the valley of Ursereen, in a wood of tall and venerable trees; a very extraordinary and fortunate circumstance for the possessor, as we will venture to say that it is the only wood that ever grew in that celebrated valley, which is the highest inhabited ground in the Alps. The host of Fleetwood carries him to a pleasure party on the lake of Uri, and chooses that time and place to acquaint him, that while he was living jollily at Paris, his father had taken the opportunity of dying quietly in Merionethshire. The effect of this intelligence upon Fleetwood is inexpressibly striking. He ate no breakfast the next morning; and it was not till the arrival of dinner, that "hunger at length subdued the obstinacy of his grief." Ruffigny, his host, now joins him; and after a reasonable allowance of sympathy and consolation, entertains him with the history of his connexion with his father.

Ruffigny, left in infancy to the guardianship of a wicked uncle who thirsted after his inheritance, had been trepanned to Lyons, and bound apprentice to a silk-weaver, or rather employed in the more laborious part of his drudgery. His feelings, on being gradually subjected to this monotonous and degrading labour, are very well described, as also the enthusiastic resolution which he forms, of

By the way, we greatly question the locality here pitched on. We know of no such lake as the lake of Uri; but we suppose the lake of Lucerne, a lake of the four cantons, was the scene of this affecting discovery. But Mr Godwin is not much at home in Switzerland.

throwing himself at the feet of the King of France, whom the boy had pictured to himself like the Henry and the Francis, the heroes of the legendary tales of his country. His escape, his journey, his disappointment, have all the same style of merit ; and it is in such painting, where the subject is actuated by some wild, uncommon, or unnatural strain of passion and feeling, that we conceive Mr Godwin's peculiar talent to lie. At Paris, the deserted Ruffigny is patronised by Fleetwood, the grandfather of our hero; and his future connexion with that family is marked with reciprocal acts of that romantic generosity, which is so common in novels, and so very rare in real life.

The main narrative is now resumed. Ruffigny accompanies Fleetwood on his return to England, where he finds in his paternal dwelling "an empty mansion and a tenanted grave." Notwithstanding his grief for his father's death, he is on the point of forming a connexion with a bewitching Mrs Comorin (quare Cormorant?) who had lately cohabited with Lord Mandeville, but, having quarrelled with her admirer, had a heart and person vacant for the first suitable offer. This naughty affair is interrupted by the precipitate retreat of Ruffigny, who, not choosing to be present where such matters were going forward, was in full march towards Switzerland, when he is recalled, by Fleetwood's consent, to sacrifice his young mistress to his old friend. After this period, the story flags insufferably. Fleetwood, like King Solomon of yore, tries the various resources of travelling, so

ciety, literature, politics, and farming, and, with him, pronounces them all vanity and vexation of spirit. In this vain pursuit, he becomes a confirmed old bachelor; and the interest of the story, contrary to that of every other novel, commences when he exchanges this unprofitable state for that of matrimony.

This grand step he is induced to take by the disinterested arguments of Mr Macneil, a shrewd Scotchman, whom he meets on the lakes of Cumberland, and who at that very moment had four unmarried daughters upon his hands. The accomplishments of these damsels were rather overshadowed by some peculiarities in the history of their mother. This lady, when very young, had, while in Italy, married her music-master, who gave her no small reason to repent her choice. Macneil delivered her from the tyranny of this ungrateful musician, who had immured her in a ruinous castle, his hereditary mansion! That she gave her deliverer her heart was natural enough, but she also bestowed upon him her hand, to which the deserted minstrel had an unalienable claim. The ladies on the lakes of Cumberland, judging that two husbands was an unreasonable allowance, declined intercourse with the fair monopolist. Macneil was therefore about to return to Italy, where he had vested his whole fortune in the hands of a banker of Genoa; but, upon the fervent suit of Fleetwood, he agreed that his youngest daughter, Mary, should remain in England. He himself, with his wife and three eldest daughters, proceed on their voyage, leaving

Mary a visitor in a family at London. The vessel in which the Macneils had embarked is wrecked in the bay of Biscay, and all that unfortunate family perish in the waves. This disastrous intelligence is nearly a death-blow to poor Mary, the sole survivor, and to whom her mother and sisters had hitherto been all in all. The Genoese banker, finding that no vouchers of his being the depositary of Macneil's fortune had escaped from the wreck, refuses to give any account of it; and our interest in Mary's distress and desolation is unnecessarily interrupted by a minute detail of the steps by which Fleetwood in vain attempted to bring a banker to confess the receipt of a sum which could not otherwise be proved against him. It is even hinted, as a reason for which he pressed his marriage with the deserted orphan, that he at length became afraid that, since the question rested on a trial of character betwixt him and the Genoese, he might himself be suspected of having embezzled her fortune. This is one of the instances of coarseness and bad taste with which Mr Godwin sometimes degrades his characters. In Caleb Williams, a gentleman passionately addicted to the manners of ancient chivalry, becomes a midnight assassin, when an honourable revenge was in his power; and in Fleetwood, a man of feeling, in soliciting an union pressed upon him by love, by honour, and by every feeling of humanity, is influenced by a motive of remote and despicable calculation, which we will venture to say never entered the head of an honest man in similar circumstances.

Fleetwood and Mary are at length married; and from this marriage, as we have already noticed, commences any interest which we take in the history of the former. Indeed it can hardly be called a history, which has neither incident nor novelty of remark to recommend it, consisting entirely of idle and inflated declamations upon the most common occurrences of human life. The union of Mary and Fleetwood, considering the youth and variable spirits of the former, and the age and confirmed prejudices of the latter, promises a more interesting subject of speculation. Upon their arrival in Wales, the reader is soon made sensible that a man of feeling, upon Mr Godwin's system, is the most selfish animal in the universe. We appeal to our fair readers if this is not a just conclusion, from the following account of the matrimonial disputes of this ill-matched pair. Upon visiting the family mansion in Merionethshire, the lady gives the first cause of disgust, by rather hastily appropriating to her own purposes a closet which had been the favourite retirement of her husband. Without having the force of mind to tell Mary that this unlucky boudoir was consecrated to his own studies, Fleetwood nourishes a kind of secret malice against his wife for her unlucky selection of this retreat, hallowed as it had been to his own exclusive use. This is hardly over when a new offence is given. While our hero is reading to his young bride his favourite play, "A Wife for a Month" (in fact he did not retain his own for many more), Mary, either from natural levity, or because the ardent

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