Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1840. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... THE DIAMOND NECKLACE.* [1837.3 CHAPTER I. Age of Romance. The age of Romance has not ceased; it never ceases; it does not, if we will think of it, so much as very sensibly decline. The passions are repressed by social forms; great passions no longer shew themselves? Why, there are passions still great enough to replenish Bedlam, for it never wants tenants; to suspend men from bed-posts, from improved-drops at the west end of Newgate. A passion that explosively shivers asunder the Life it took rise in, ought to be regarded as considerable: more no passion, in the highest heyday of Romance, yet did. The passions, by grace of the Supernal and also of the Infernal Powers (for both have a hand in it), can never fail us. And then, as to 'social forms, ' be it granted that they are of the most buckram quality, and bind men up into the pitifullest straitlaced commonplace existence, -- you ask, Where is the Romance? In the Scotch way one answers, Where is it not? That very spectacle of an Immortal Nature, with faculties and destiny extending through Eternity, hampered and bandaged up, by * Fraser's Magazine, Nos. 85 and 86, nurses, pedagogues, posturemasters, and the tongues of innumerable old women (named 'force of public opinion '); by prejudice, custom, want of knowledge, want of money, want of strength, into, say, the meagre Pattern-Figure that, in these days, meets you in all thoroughfares: a ' god-created Man, ' all but abnegating the character of Man; forced to exist, automatised, mummy-wise (scarcely in rare moments audible or visible from amid his wrappages and cerements), as Gentleman or Gigman;* and so selling his birthright of Eternity for the three daily meals, poor at best, which Time yields: -- is not this spectacle itself highly romantic, tragical, if we...