German literature as undeservedly retarded. Lewis, however, certainly was a popular writer. He is mentioned in the titlepage of this posthumous work as author of The Monk,' The Castle Spectre,' Tales of Wonder,' &c.,-poor passports to fame, if this were all. But it is only justice to say, that his works, not here named, deserve more praise than the three which are;—the 'Bravo of Venice,' (for instance, though it is not original,) a Tragedy, and some of his Poems. The Monk,' with all its notoriety, was a poor book, which, like persecuted sedition, was perhaps rather raised than depressed by its demerits; and never could have been regarded as dangerously seductive, if it had not been banished from decent drawingrooms.

6

As a Member of Parliament, Lewis seems to have been a cipher; and, if we may judge by the testimony of his friends, he was little more important as a member of society. The goodnature of Sir Walter Scott endeavoured to treat it as a matter of congratulation, that he was one whose faults are only ridiculous; while Lord Byron, on hearing of his death, poured forth his friendship in the coarse assertions that he was 'a d-d bore,tedious as well as contradictory to every thing and every body;' and concluded this tribute with the consistent couplet, which, separated from the context, has been thought worthy of insertion as a motto in the titlepage of this work

I would give many a sugar-cane,
Monk Lewis were alive again.'

Lewis appears to have been regarded as thoroughly kindhearted-boyish in character as in appearance, and alive to all the generous impulses of amiable childhood-as one for whom even his cleverness could not obtain respect, but whose goodness of disposition made it difficult not to like him.

In no more imposing light than this stood the name of Lewis, in the eye of the world, previous to the publication of the present work. But its position is now improved. It is not easy to believe that the writer of this agreeable Journal could have been 'tedious' and contradictory.' It seems to afford evidence which it is difficult to resist, that the writer was not only a pleasant companion, but a sensible and practical man-keen-sighted without bitterness-a good-natured noter of passing absurdities, without any cynical disposition to censure-seeing things through no discoloured medium of sentimentality or romance, but taking a plain, correct, man-of-the-world's view of all that passed around him. This Journal also tends to raise his literary reputation. We believe it to have been an unstudied production, never intended for publication; but whether this was strictly the case or not, it stands

high among works of a similar kind, for grace, lightness, pleasantry, descriptive power, felicity of expression, and conversational fluency and freedom. We will give a few extracts in support of our praise. Most of those who have had experience complain of the tedium and monotony of a sea voyage. Yet the recital of a rather tedious and unprosperous voyage by no means partakes of this quality in Mr Lewis's Journal; and though fifty pages are occupied in relating it, we are not impatient to get on shore. His 'miseries' are made amusing in the same vein of humour with which various minor miseries were rendered mirthful in Mr Beresford's pleasant book. He thus bewails the perversities of the weather:

The weather continues intolerable. Boisterous waves running mountains high, with no wind, or a foul one. Dead calms by day, which prevent our making any progress; and violent storms by night, which prevent our getting any sleep.

Every thing is in a state of perpetual motion. "Nulla quies intus (nor outus indeed for the matter of that), nullâque silentia parte." We drink our tea exactly as Tantalus did in the infernal regions; we keep bobbing at the basin for half an hour together without being able to get a drop; and certainly nobody on ship-board can doubt the truth of the proverb, “ Many things fall out between the cup and the lip."'

< The wind continues contrary, and the weather is as disagreeable and perverse as it can well be; indeed, I understand that in these latitudes nothing can be expected but heavy gales or dead calms, which make them particularly pleasant for sailing, especially as the calms are by far the most disagreeable of the two: the wind steadies the ship; but when she creeps as slowly as she does at present (scarcely going a mile in four hours), she feels the whole effect of the sea breaking against her, and rolls backwards and forwards with every billow as it rises and falls. In the meanwhile, every thing seems to be in a state of the most active motion, except the ship; while we are carrying a spoonful of soup to our mouths, the remainder takes the "glorious golden opportunity" to empty itself into our laps, and the glasses and salt-cellars carry on a perpetual domestic warfare during the whole time of dinner, like the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Nothing is so common as to see a roast goose suddenly jump out of its dish in the middle of dinner, and make a frisk from one end of the table to the other; and we are quite in the habit of laying wagers which of the two boiled fowls will arrive at the bottom first.

N.B. To-day the fowl without the liver wing was the favourite, but the knowing ones were taken in; the uncarved one carried it hollow.' A storm is thus described :—

‹ At one_this_morning, a violent gust of wind came on; and, at the rate of ten miles an hour, carried us through the Chops of the Channel, formed by the Scilly Rocks and the Isle of Ushant. But I thought that the advance was dearly purchased by the terrible night which the storm

made us pass. The wind roaring, the waves dashing against the stern, till at last they beat in the quarter gallery; the ship, too, rolling from side to side, as if every moment she were going to roll over and over! Mr J- was heaved off one of the sofas, and rolled along, till he was stopped by the table. He then took his seat upon the floor, as the more secure position; and half an hour afterwards, another heave chucked him back again upon the sofa. The captain snuffed out one of the candles, and both being tied to the table, could not relight it with the other: so the steward came to do it; when a sudden heel of the ship made him extinguish the second candle, tumbled him upon the sofa on which I was lying, and made the candle which he had brought with him fly out of the candlestick, through a cabin window at his elbow; and thus we were all left in the dark. Then the intolerable noise! the cracking of bulk-heads! the sawing of ropes! the screeching of the tiller! the trampling of the sailors! the clattering of the crockery! Every thing above deck and below deck, all in motion at once! Chairs, writing-desks, books, boxes, bundles, fire-irons and fenders, flying to one end of the room; and the next moment (as if they had made a mistake) flying back again to the other with the same hurry and confusion! "Confusion worse confounded!" Of all the inconveniences attached to a vessel, the incessant noise appears to me the most insupportable! As to our live stock, they seem to have made up their minds on the subject, and say with one of Ariosto's knights (when he was cloven from the head to the chine), "or convien morire." Our fowls and ducks are screaming and quacking their last by dozens; and by Tuesday morning, it is supposed that we shall not have an animal alive in the ship, except the black terrier-and my. friend the squeaking pig, whose vocal powers are still audible, maugre the storm and the sailors, and who (I verily believe) only continues to survive out of spite, because he can join in the general chorus, and help to increase the number of abominable sounds.

'We are now tossing about in the Bay of Biscay: I shall remember it as long as I live. The "beef-eater's front" could never have "beamed more terrible" upon Don Ferolo Whiskerandos, "in Biscay's Bay, when he took him prisoner," than Biscay's Bay itself will appear to me the next time that I approach it.'

By way of contrast, take the annoyances of a calm, which seem equally unable to disturb his equanimity :

Our wind is like Lady Townley's separate allowance: "that little has been made less ;" or, rather, it has dwindled away to nothing. We are now so absolutely becalmed, that I begin seriously to suspect all the crew of being Phæacians; and that at this identical moment Neptune is amusing himself by making the ship take root in the ocean a trick which he played once before to a vessel (they say) in the days of Ulysses. I have got some locust plants on board in pots: if we continue to sail as slowly as we have done for the last week, before we reach Jamaica my plants will be forest trees, little Jem, the cabin-boy, will have been obliged to shave, and the black terrier will have died of old age long ago.'

The following is an amusing sketch of the intellectual occupătions of the crew :—

On this day, from a sense of propriety no doubt, as well as from having nothing else to do, all the crew in the morning betook themselves to their studies. The carpenter was very seriously spelling a comedy; Edward was engaged with "The Six Princesses of Babylon;" a third was amusing himself with a tract "On the Management of Bees;" another had borrowed the cabin-boy's "Sorrows of Werter," and was reading it aloud to a large circle-some whistling-and others yawning; and Werter's abrupt transitions, and exclamations, and raptures, and refinements, read in the same loud monotonous tone, and without the slightest respect paid to stops, had the oddest effect possible. "She did not look at me; I thought my heart would burst; the coach drove off; she looked out of the window; was that look meant for me? yes it was; perhaps it might be; do not tell me that it was not meant for me. Oh, my friend, my friend, am I not a fool, a madman?" ("This part is rather stupid, or so, you see, but no matter for that; where was I? oh!") "I am now sure, Charlotte loves me: I prest my hand on my heart; I said, Klopstock;' yes, Charlotte loves me; what! does Charlotte love me? oh, rapturous thought! my brain turns round:-Immortal powershow !—what !—oh, my friend, my friend," &c. &c. &c. I was surprised to find that (except Edward's Fairy Tale) none of them were reading works that were at all likely to amuse them (Smollett or Fielding, for instance), or any which might interest them as relating to their profession, such as voyages and travels; much less any which had the slightest reference to the particular day. However, as most of them were reading what they could not possibly understand, they might mistake them for books of devotion, for any thing they knew to the contrary; or, perhaps, they might have so much reverence for all books in print, as to think that, provided they did but read something, it was doing a good work, and it did not much matter what. So one of Congreve's fine ladies swears Mrs Mincing, the waiting maid, to secrecy, "upon an odd volume of Messalina's Poems." Sir Dudley North, too, informs us, (or is it his brother Roger? but I mean the Turkey merchant)-that at Constantinople the respect for printed books is so great, that when people are sick, they fancy that they can be read into health again; and if the Koran should not be in the way, they will make a shift with a few verses of the Bible, or a chapter or two of the Talmud, or of any other book that comes first to hand, rather than not read something. I think Sir Dudley says, that he himself cured an old Turk of the toothach, by administering a few pages of "Ovid's Metamorphoses ;" and in an old receiptbook, we are directed for the cure of a double tertian fever, "to drink plentifully of cock-broth, and sleep with the Second Book of the Iliad under the pillow." If, instead of sleeping with it under the pillow, the doctor had desired us to read the Second Book of the Iliad in order that we might sleep, I should have had some faith in his prescription myself.'

Though amused during the voyage, the reader will be most interested by the accounts of negro life in the West Indies. These

are abundant; for Lewis seems to have been very observant, to have lived much among his negroes, and to have evinced an amiable desire to render himself conversant with their habits and feelings, to learn their wants, and ameliorate their condition. Whatever may have been the errors of his head, it is impossible not to esteem the man who has shown such genuine benevolence of heart. Nevertheless, this Journal does not afford much that can be called information, and it is difficult to draw from it any general inferences. It is an evil commonly attendant upon journals, that, recording as they do the impressions of the moment, they are not unfrequently contradictory in their tone, do not generalize and abstract, and do not give us the conclusion at which the writer arrives upon a reconsideration of all that he has witnessed. This is more especially the case, when the work is one emanating from a sensitive and imaginative mind, easily wrought upon, and deriving its colour from the passing events.

There was much of this chameleon-like quality in the mind of Lewis; and he was disposed by nature rather to observe what played upon the surface, than to attempt to penetrate beneath. In his estimate of the condition and happiness of the West India negro, he was perhaps too much inclined to accept as a criterion that light-hearted gaiety in moments of relaxation, and that noisy exhibition of child-like mirth, which is not incompatible with degradation and oppression, and is greatly the result of natural temperament. That negro slaves seem very happy, a great deal of concurrent testimony compels us to believe; but to use this appearance as a serious argument in defence of their condition, is as little reasonable as it would be to cite the gambols of May-day chimney-sweepers as a proof of the humanity with which climbing-boys are treated. It is highly creditable to Lewis's feelings, that even the noisy gaiety, which his arrival and the subsequent holiday created, could not blind and reconcile him to the sight and sound of slavery.

'Soon after my reaching the lodging-house at Savannah la Mar, a remarkably clean-looking negro lad presented himself with some water and a towel: I concluded him to belong to the inn; and, on my returning the towel, as he found that I took no notice of him, he at length ventured to introduce himself, by saying,-" Massa not know me; me your slave!” -and really the sound made me feel a pang at the heart. The lad appeared all gafety and good humour, and his whole countenance expressed anxiety to recommend himself to my notice; but the word "slave" seemed to imply, that, although he did feel pleasure then in serving me, if he had detested me he must have served me still. I really felt quite humiliated at the moment, and was tempted to tell him,-"Do not say that again; say that you are my negro, but do not call yourself my

slave.'