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The magazines were children of a day, and the editor's repute as such could hardly survive them long. The fame which belongs to Charles Brockden Brown, grudgingly accorded by a country that can ill afford to neglect one of its earliest, most devoted, and most original workers, rests on his novels. Judged by standards of the present day, these are far from faultless.
Literature had not yet attained, in the United States, the rank of a distinct and powerful profession. Fifteen years before, Brockden Brown had died prematurely after a hapless struggle, worn out with overwork, the first man who had undertaken to live by writing in this country since its colonization.
Scott, undoubtedly, was the author who had most affected his mental habit, and with this exception, notwithstanding what some critics have alleged of his so-called "American predecessors," Charles Brockden Brown and the author of "Peter Rugg," there is no trace of any other literary influence upon him either in this preparatory time or later in life; but something of Scott is to be found permanently in his creative work, in the figure-grouping, the high speeches, the oddities of character humorously treated, and especially in the use of set scenes individually elaborated to give the high lights and to advance the story.
There in his works a mixture of Puritan reserve and wild imagination, of passion and description, of the allegorical and the real, which some will fail to understand, and which others will positively reject, but which, to ourselves, is fascinating, and which entitles him to be placed on a level with Brockden Brown and the author of 'Rip Van Winkle. 'The Scarlet Letter' will increase his reputation with all who do not shrink from the invention of the tale; but this, as we have said, is more than ordinarily painful.
%History of the Conquest of Peru.% With a Preliminary view of the Civilisation of the Incas. By WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, Esq. Portraits, Maps, &c. 2 vols. 8vo, half Calf, $5 00; Sheep extra, $4 50; Muslin, $4 00. %Biographical and Critical Miscellanies.% Containing Notices of Charles Brockden Brown, the American Novelist. Asylum for the Blind. Irving's Conquest of Grenada. Cervantes. Sir W. Scott.
The interest in the tatter's review of our poor field must be languid, however, for nobody has taken the trouble to remind its author that Brockden Brown who is cited as a typical American writer, true to local character, scenery, and color put no more flavor of American life and soil in his books than is to be found in "Frankenstein."
He calls himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale, and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through his densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope. Your true friend, P. P. S. Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
There was no other novelist in the field. Charles Brockden Brown had been dead several years. Irving and Paulding were writing only short sketches.
Charles Brockden Brown, a writer whose merits have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, has given a powerful and philosophical analysis of this morbid state of mind this diseased conscientiousness, obeying the mad suggestions of a disordered brain as the injunctions of Divinity in his remarkable story of Wieland.
The interest in the tatter's review of our poor field must be languid, however, for nobody has taken the trouble to remind its author that Brockden Brown who is cited as a typical American writer, true to local character, scenery, and color put no more flavor of American life and soil in his books than is to be found in "Frankenstein."
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