pathywith suffering cover his limited command of medical experience, that we are hardly sensible of any shortcoming. The field which the "Diary" covered was then afresh one, and to the favor with which it was received was due the host of fictions cast in the form of professional experiences that speedily followed it. Probably none of his contemporaries could have played the rôle of the kind-hearted, philanthropic physician, who, not unacquainted with misfortune himself, has learned to hold out a helping hand to the miserable. His deep knowledge of the human heart, and his compassion with distress whether bodily or mental, enabled him to feel quite at home when dealing with the cases of those who were either expiating the consequences of their sins or were suffering from the unmerited harshness of a cold world. No one is likely to read the "Diary," however hurriedly, without perceiving that the author has probed each passion and dissected every feeling before settling in his own mind the parts which were to be allotted to them in the action of the plot. Mr. Warren was a psychologist in days when psychological inquiry was less a requirement of the novelist's art than at present. The story of the period depended for its success less upon the study of character than upon novelty of plot and energy of action, and we do not hesitate to trace the part which mental analysis now occupies in fiction in some measure to the influence which the delicate studies in the "Diary" soon began to exercise upon literary taste. Since the days of Richardson, scarcely any English novelist had studied human nature with the same minuteness and care, or had given the same attention to the proper co-ordination of the affections with the requirements of literary art; and, like Richardson, Warren not unfrequently falls into the mistake of making his readers a party to his analytical investigations, instead of placing merely the results before them. But though the detailed exposition of feeling which characterizes so prominently all Warren's novels may be occasionally pushed to such a length as, in the case of a less-gifted writer, might run the risk of impinging on the reader's patience, it tends greatly to preserve the illusion of naturalness and probability which we never miss from his creations. In this way the passages from the "Diary" come to have all the vraisemblance of a real record of medical experience. So powerfully is the mental side of suffering delineated, that we scarcely notice that its physical aspects receive a somewhat slight treatment. But though with our knowledge of the authorship, we can detect professional trippings, we must still wonder at that fulness and diversity of medical knowledge which were sufficient to impose upon the faculty of the day.
It would be superfluous on our part to recall the testimony which particular passages of the "Diary" bear to the literary powers which Warren had matured at that early age. In treating of a book so universally read, the critic has no need to refer to the evidence on which his judgment is based. Yet we cannot help feeling that we are arousing pleasant as well as tender recollections in the minds of old readers of Maga, when we mention some of the more striking scenes in which the physician took part. Who that has read "The Scholar's Deathbed" will ever forget the painful picture of a life unable to divest itself of its ruling passion for thoughts befitting the verge of the unseen world? The miserable termination of the "Man about Town's" career, with the loathsome picture of the grosser vices and their punishment, does not take a less-firm hold of the memory; and there is probably no "passage" in the whole of the "Diary" that better illustrates Warren's power of securing the whole of his intended effect: without entering upon descriptions from which the sensitive mind might be in danger of revolting. "The Statesman," which seems to mix up so strangely the stories of Canning and Castlereagh, and in which we can hardly distinguish between what is taken from history and what comes from the imagination, is another sketch which the mention of the "Diary" will at once bring back to the remembrance of those who have read it. Another paper, "The Martyr Philosopher," in which Warren deals with a subject that always presented a powerful attraction to his genius — the effects of unmerited misfortune upon a pure and noble mind — is one of the finest specimens of vivid description combined with pathetic power that he has left behind him. He himself tells us, with pardonable pride, in his preface to one of the later editions of the "Diary," how an excellent nobleman, since dead, was so much interested in this paper that he wrote to the conductor of this magazine, asking permission to reprint it, at his own expense, for circulation among the upper classes of society. But what need have we to discuss individual stories, when the whole of the "Diary" itself bears a far stronger testimony to his
