those in Hervey's vessels do; and we presume that raking midship sections are fashionable on the east coast. A nice-looking schooner and yawl are also laid down in Ratsey's yard, but neither is intended for racing.

At Southampton we find Hatcher busy upon a forty tonner for Major Ewing; she is longer and narrower, and has less displacement than he usually gives his vessels; this boat will be named the Norman, and is said to be an improved Alcyone. The latter was heralded as an "improved" Muriel, but the improvements have hitherto not been manifested. Payne is building a twenty-five tonner; this is a vessel of the ordinary V type, with very rising floor, and two extremely sharp ends. Payne is also altering the Foxhound by cleaning out her quarters a little; we fancy he would have done more good if he had eased her quarters just above the load line-if any alteration were required in so good a little vessel. Fyfe, at Fairley, we hear, has one or two cutters under forty tons building, but we have not heard if there are any building in other yards.

We will now just run over the list of cutters, and see what we are likely to have in the racing line during the summer. In the first place we shall most likely have the Oimara, and we hope that Mr. Wylie will have better fortune in future. To sail a big cutter like the Oimara in a race is no joke, and it must be highly mortifying to find what is absolutely the best English racing yacht afloat handicapped out of everything wherever she goes. The other big cutters will probably be the Condor, Rose of Devon, Julia, Sea Bird, Arrow, Garrion, Menai, Fiona, and the new one of Count Batthyany's. These are eight, and they would make a very nice match by themselves. It is scarcely satisfactory sailing cutters of from eighty to one hundred and seventy tons each, against forty tonners. In light winds the small ones get all the best of it, and in a hard breeze and tumbling sea the hundred tonners fairly lose the small fry. It will, perhaps, be said that each class gets its day, but we imagine that it would be infinitely more satisfactory if the classes were separated. We hear that it is doubtful whether either the Vanguard or Fiona will be fitted out, and in their absence the Iona should pick up some cups if she is as good as she ought to be on the promises of her builder. The "broom" is up in the Volante, but her old rival Mosquito will most likely come out and astonish us as much as ever; among those under sixty tons will be the Christabel, recently bought by Col. Gourley; it has been said that her name is to be changed to Glaucus, and such a name as that ought to be capable of sinking any vessel it is attached to. Besides the Christabel we do not know anything between fifty

and sixty tons in the racing line, but there will be plenty of the forty class. Hatcher is principally answerable for these, and we must say that he is pretty lucky in building for men who race all round the coast, and each gets a turn in "saving her time." During this summer we shall probably see the Niobe, Muriel, Alcyone, Vindex, Dione, Glance, and Norman, all by Hatcher, and opposed to these there will be the Marquis of Ailsa's Foxhound, the forty tonner building by Ratsey, a new one by Fyfe, and the Banshee. The latter is an iron boat of fifty tons, built at Liverpool some ten years ago. She has recently been purchased by Mr. Dunbar, whose yachting name is identified with the Madcap schooner and Pearl yawl. The Banshee in light winds is no doubt a very fast boat, but she has very ugly hollow lines, and is not a good sea-boat. There will be at least a dozen to come in under the twenty tons class, and quite as many will be found when the fifteen tonners are summed up. Altogether we anticipate a very busy and gay season afloat, whether we are visited by the Americans or not.

ON THE COMIC WRITERS OF

ENGLAND.

BY CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE.

XIV. FIELDING, SMOLLETT AND STERNE.

HE anecdote is upon record, that when Reynolds first met with Johnson's Life of Savage, he commenced reading it with one elbow resting on the mantel-piece, and that he never moved from that position till he had finished the biography, when he found his arm so benumbed as to be scarcely able to move it. It were difficult to conceive of even few circumstances more gratifying to the honest self-love of an author than the record of such a fact, coming, too, from a man possessing the graceful perception and cultivated understanding of the first President of our Academy of Painting. As a pendant to the above anecdote, I was acquainted with an old gentleman who told me that when he received the "New Novel" of "Tom Jones" from his bookseller, he never left his seat till he closed the last volume at the last page: and no wonder, for it is a story of a life that grapples the attention of the reader-particularly the English reader-" with hooks of steel;" for no novelist before him, and but few of eminence after him, have been so thoroughly indigenous in scene, in character, in feeling, and in manners, as Fielding; and not only are all his novels thoroughly English, but they are as thoroughly his own. In reading them, we feel as if they were the social and domestic history of the early part of the last century; and there can be little doubt that such is the case, for Fielding drew all his characters from the life, his plots from his own invention; and these are almost equal in merit to the other, for I suppose that no one, from his own to the present day, when reading the book, ever anticipated the origin of Tom Jones. He must, indeed, have been a "wise child" could he, or any one else, have guessed the Foundling's father or mother; and yet the ease and natural development of the story are such, there is so little of the artifice, the machinery of plot in it, that it has all the effect of certainly a romantic, but yet of a true biography. In reading the novels of Fielding, and tracing his characters, we never catch ourselves exclaim

ing, "Oh, that is very improbable, that character is much overdrawn!" Even his Parson Adams (perhaps the most fanciful in all his gallery of portraits) is nevertheless a vera effigies; and I, in my contracted worldly experience, could have closely paralleled that original for an almost incredible homeliness and simplicity of mind, and he also a Christian minister. It is hazardous to pronounce what character is improbable, what combination monstrous. The "yarn of our life is so mingled," we have all so many antagonistic and contradictory qualities, that that artist draws the most natural character who is not over anxious about its uniformity in good or evil.

Not only, however, is Fielding distinguished by the fidelity of his characters, but with an almost prophetic inspiration he reveals to us the penetralia of the human heart, its secret and profound movements, with the causes and consequences of volition and action. Moreover, with that expanded knowledge and experience, he constantly exhibits a strong sympathy with his species, and which, with his great master (Shakespeare) he ratifies by insisting upon the redeeming presence of "good in things evil." The most enlarged and the soundest in knowledge are ever tolerant of the defects and infirmities of others. So accurate, so natural, in short, are Fielding's charts of characters, that it has been urged by some that he must have had his materials ready-made to his hands, as Defoe is said to have had with many of his extraordinary histories and biographies. Indeed there is little doubt that he had, and amply did he avail himself of his resources, and so has every one who has an eye in his head, and a head to concoct and record all that he perceives transacting around him. The great book of Nature is open to us all to copy from, and all the human characters that we see emblazoned in works of fiction are only just so many copies of what the writers have witnessed in real life, as the same writers describe the scenery appropriate to the circumstances associate and congenial with the time and action of their characters. Every writer of fiction selects for the purpose of his story persons whom he has seen and noted in real life. The merit consists in causing the persons to talk like themselves. That is the only "invention " in a novelist (after his plot), and very great is that invention-the greater, of course, the more nearly the ideas and the order of language harmonise with the order of character. As there is "nothing new under the sun" in human character; all is but an endless system of permutation; so, when we say of any newly-introduced individual in a novel, "That is an original character," it is but one more in the long train of beings that has hitherto escaped the graphic eye of the historian. It will readily be believed that there is no intention to

depreciate the merits of a man like Fielding; for, after all, the seeing and the recording of that which we have seen constitute the talent of the artist; the more faithfully, the more meritorious the transmission.

Fielding, in his public capacity of magistrate, as well as in the public career he pursued, had an infinite variety of characters come under his notice; and his order of mind and natural tendency being that of studying the evolutions of human action, the whole animus of his genius was directed to that order of delineation. Hence is to be noticed in his novels how very meagre are his descriptions of scenery, particularly of rural scenery. Compare them with Walter Scott's, whose order of mind was absolutely panoramic. Scott was a true poet. Fielding had very little external imagination, and even less fancy; he never went out of the scenes in which he had been accustomed to move. He busied himself solely with human nature; and rarely has any one turned his studies to more ample account than he. Its principles, and general, intimate, and remote feelings, acting under particular circumstances and impressions, moved him to an intense degree. They were ever present with him; and, as Hazlitt has well observed, "he makes use of incident and situation only to bring out character." Instances of these might be enumerated to a remarkable extent. In "Tom Jones" alone they recur constantly. In all the collisions between Squire Western and Sophia, his utter incapacity in the first instance to conceive that his daughter should or could fall in love with Tom Jones; his fury against him for daring so bold a flight as the aspiring to her heart; his coarse and insane denunciations of her for daring to make her own election; his scouring the country after her when she has eloped, with that clever touch of the wild animal instinct in him; leaving the pursuit of her (whom he most loves upon earth-after himself) when he hears the cry of the hounds, in order that he may join in the fox-chase; his swine-like obstinacy and tyranny being perfectly consistent with his love of his daughter; but even that subservient to his passion for hunting. And at the close of the history, when matters have been cleared to the hero's advantage, and he has received the consent of the Squire to claim his daughter's hand, the transport of his rage upon finding that now that daughter has an objection of her own against the man for whom she formerly had asserted her right of preference in contradiction to his will, he having no idea of any will being superior to his own on this side of Omnipotence; and he has, indeed, but a limited idea of any thing beyond the circle of his own fireside and his dogkennel, in both spheres wherein he reigns autocrat.

Again, the elegant squabbles we are entertained with between him