at length, entangled in the complicated snarl of his own intrigue, he is finally obliged, when the fatal hour arrives, to cut the knot which he cannot unravel. There is no other way by which we can account for the forced and violent dénouemens which bring up so many of Brown's fictions. Voltaire has remarked, somewhere in his Commentaries on Corneille, that "an author may write with the rapidity of genius, but should correct with scrupulous deliberation." Our author seems to have thought it sufficient to comply with the first half of the maxim.
In 1801 Brown published his novel of Clara Howard, and in 1804 closed the series with Jane Talbot, first printed in England. They are composed in a more subdued tone, discarding those startling preternatural incidents of which he had made such free use in his former fictions. In the preface to his first romance, "Wieland," he remarks, in allusion to the mystery on which the story is made to depend, that "it is a sufficient vindication of the writer if history furnishes one parallel fact." But the French critic, who tells us le vrai pent quelquefois n'etre pas vraisemblable, has, with more judgment, condemned this vicious recurrence to extravagant and improbable incident. Truth cannot always be pleaded in vindication of the author of a fiction any more than of a libel. Brown seems to have subsequently come into the same opinion; for, in a letter addressed to his brother James, after the publication of "Edgar Huntly," he observes, "Your remarks upon the gloominess and out-of-nature in-
