rather be called, of history, for the purpose, as he intimates in his preface, of imparting to others some of the fruits of the melancholy lesson he had himself experienced. Such was the origin of his next novel, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. This was the fatal year of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, The action of the story is chiefly confined to that city, but seems to be prepared with little contrivance, on no regular or systematic plan, consisting simply of a succession of incidents, having little cohesion except in reference to the hero, but affording situations of great interest, and frightful fidelity of colouring. The pestilence wasting a thriving and populous city has furnished a topic for more than one great master. It will be remembered as the terror of every schoolboy in the pages of Thucydides; it forms the gloomy portal to the light and airy fictions of Boccaccio; and it has furnished a subject for the graphic pencil of the English novelist De Foe, the only one of the three who never witnessed the horrors which he paints, but whose fictions wear an aspect of reality which history can rarely reach.
Brown has succeeded in giving the same terrible distinctness to his impressions by means of individual portraiture. He has, however, not confined himself to this, but, by a variety of touches, lays open to our view the whole interior of the city of the plague. Instead of expatiating on the loathsome symptoms and physical ravages of the disease, he selects the most striking moral circumstances which
