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"And that genius, finding itself at the North Pole amid Cimmerian darkness in the atmosphere of a childish intellect in other words, the society of a pure-minded virgin, who, though a good romance-writer, writes nothing but what a virgin may read, and, though a bel esprit, says her prayers and goes to church then genius well, pardon my ignorance, what does genius do?"
If, as is said, Lord Brougham helped to write Rutherford's narrative, he did his work very well; but after the exposure of its "facts" by Archdeacon W.L. Williams, it can only be read as the yarn of a runaway sailor, who had reasons for not telling the whole truth, and a capacity and knowledge of local colour which would have made him a capital romance-writer, had he been an educated man.
I met him one night at a great evening-party, looking on from a nook a little removed from the full glare of the soirée. Soon, however, it was whispered about that the famous American romance-writer was in the room, and an enthusiastic English lady, a genuine admirer and intelligent reader of his books, ran for her album and attacked him for "a few words and his name at the end."
There is no romance-writer who has imagined more horrors than we have evidences were perpetrated under the name of justice in these frightful vaults, unknown to the busy citizens around them, within a few feet of the streets down which a gay wedding procession might pass, while a true patriot was torn in every limb, and racked to death by the refined cruelty of his fellow-men.
But the fair romance-writer smiled at their pity, and had good sense enough to refrain from writing in the newspapers that she was not insane. Radcliffe had never seen Haddon Hall. The sweeper of New Haven College, in New England, lately becoming a widower, conceived a violent passion for the relict of his deceased Cambridge brother, which he expressed in the following strain:
This was more important than what I was talking of; the sleeping child passed into the great-grandmother's arms. When the old lady left us, the old man asked me, "Where were you born?" I told him. "What is your profession?" I told him I was a romance-writer. "What is that?" "One who can guess by the end of a story what the whole story was from the beginning."
Nicole attacking Desmarets, who had turned prophet after the failure of his Clovis, alluded to the author's comedies, and exclaimed with all the severity of Port-Royal, "A romance-writer and a scenic poet is a public poisoner not of bodies but of souls."
Such was the man whose life we have undertaken to narrate, a man who represents a complete type of wickedness, and who corresponds to the most hideous sketch ever devised by poet or romance-writer: Facts without importance of their own, which would be childish if recorded of anyone else, obtain a sombre reflection from other facts which precede them, and thenceforth cannot be passed over in silence.
Virgil himself transferred whole lines and passages, not merely from earlier, but even from contemporary poets; and in prose writing, one annalist cut up and reshaped the work of another with as little hesitation as a mediaeval romance-writer. In this matter Livy allowed himself full liberty; and his work absorbed, and in a great measure blotted out, those of his predecessors.
And though I, no less cheerfully, grant that we have now living among us a creator of poetic romance immeasurably more inventive than they, appealing to our credulity in portents the most monstrous, with a charm of style the most conversationally familiar, still I cannot conceive that even that unrivalled romance-writer can so bewitch our understandings as to make us believe that, if Miss Mordaunt's cat dislikes to wet her feet, it is probably because in the prehistoric age her ancestors lived in the dry country of Egypt; or that when some lofty orator, a Pitt or a Gladstone, rebuts with a polished smile which reveals his canine teeth the rude assault of an opponent, he betrays his descent from a 'semi-human progenitor' who was accustomed to snap at his enemy.
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