abound in the woods, and from which our soldiers suffered in the most dreadful manner. The Ceylonese, in compensation for their animated plagues, are endowed with two vegetable blessings, the cocoanut tree and the talipot tree. The latter affords a prodigious leaf, impenetrable to sun or rain, and large enough to shelter ten men. It is a natural umbrella,

and is of as eminent service in that country as a greatcoat tree would be in this. A leaf of the talipot tree is a tent to the soldier, a parasol to the traveller, and a book to the scholar. * The cocoa tree affords bread, milk, oil, wine, spirits, vinegar, yeast, sugar, cloth, paper, huts, and ships.

We could with great pleasure proceed to give a farther abstract of this very agreeable and interesting publication, which we very strongly recommend to the public. It is written with great modesty, entirely without pretensions, and abounds with curious and important information. Mr. Percival will accept our best thanks for the amusement he has afforded us. When we can praise with such justice, we are always happy to do it; and regret that the rigid and independent honesty which we have made the very basis of our literary undertaking, should so frequently compel us to speak of the authors who come before us, in a style so different from that in which we have vindicated the merits of Mr. Percival.

* All books are written upon it in Ceylon.

DELPHINE. (E. REVIEW, 1803.)

Delphine. By MADAME DE STAEL HOLSTEIN, London. Mawman. 6 vols. 12mo.

THIS dismal trash, which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic among us with gaping, has so alarmed Bonaparte, that he has seized the whole impression, sent Madame de Staël out of Paris, and, for aught we know, sleeps in a nightcap of steel, and dagger-proof blankets. To us it appears rather an attack upon the Ten Commandments, than the government of Bonaparte, and calculated not so much to enforce the rights of the Bourbons, as the benefits of adultery, murder, and a great number of other vices, which have been somehow or other strangely neglected in this country, and too much so (according to the apparent opinion of Madame de Staël) even in France.

It happens, however, fortunately enough, that her book is as dull as it could have been if her intentions had been good; for wit, dexterity, and the pleasant energies of the mind, seldom rank themselves on the side of virtue and social order; while vice is spiritual, eloquent, and alert, ever choice in expression, happy in allusion, and judicious in arrangement.

The story is simply this.- Delphine, a rich young widow, presents her cousin Matilda de Vernon with a considerable estate, in order to enable her to marry Leonce Mondeville. To this action she is excited by the arts and the intrigues of Madame de Vernon, an hackneyed Parisian lady, who hopes, by this marriage, to be able to discharge her numerous and

pressing debts. Leonce, who, like all other heroes of novels, has fine limbs, and fine qualities, comes to Paris-dislikes Matilda-falls in love with Delphine, Delphine with him; and they are upon the eve of jilting poor Matilda, when, from some false reports spread abroad respecting the character of Delphine (which are aggravated by her own imprudences, and by the artifices of Madame Vernon), Leonce, not in a fit of honesty, but of revenge, marries the lady whom he came to marry. Soon after, Madame de Vernon dies discovers the artifices by which she had prevented the union of Leonce and Delphine — and then, after this catastrophe, which ought to have terminated the novel, come two long volumes of complaint and despair. Delphine becomes a nun — runs away from the nunnery with Leonce, who is taken by some French soldiers, upon the supposition that he has been serving in the French emigrant army against his country—is shot, and upon his dead body falls Delphine as dead as he.

Making every allowance for reading this book in a translation, and in a very bad translation, we cannot but deem it a heavy performance. The incidents are vulgar; the characters vulgar too, except those of Delphine and Madame de Vernon. Madame de Staël has not the artifice to hide what is coming. In travelling through a flat country, or a flat brook, we see our road before us for half the distance we are going. There are no agreeable sinuosities, and no speculations whether we are to ascend next, or descend; what new sight we are to enjoy, or to which side we are to bend. Leonce is robbed and half murdered; the apothecary of the place is certain he will not live; we were absolutely certain that he would. live, and could predict to an hour the time of his re

covery. In the same manner we could have prophesied every event of the book a whole volume before its occurrence.

This novel is a perfect Alexandrian. The two last volumes are redundant, and drag their wounded length it should certainly have terminated where the interest ceases, at the death of Madame de Vernon; but, instead of this, the scene-shifters come and pick up the dead bodies, wash the stage, sweep it, and do every thing which the timely fall of the curtain should have excluded from the sight, and left to the imagination of the audience. We humbly apprehend, that young gentlemen do not in general make their tutors the confidants of their passion; at least we can find no rule of that kind laid down either by Miss Hamilton or Miss Edgeworth, in their treatises on education. The tutor of Leonce is Mr. Barton, a grave old gentleman, in a peruke and snuffcoloured clothes. Instead of writing to this solemn personage about second causes, the ten categories, and the eternal fitness of things, the young lover raves to him, for whole pages, about the white neck and auburn air of his Delphine; and, shame to tell! the liquorish old pedagogue seems to think these amorous ebullitions the pleasantest sort of writing in usum Delphini that he has yet met with.

By altering one word, and making only one false quantity*, we shall change the rule of Horace to

Nec febris intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus

Inciderit.'

* Perhaps a fault of all others which the English are least disposed to pardon. A young man, who, on a public occasion, makes a false quantity at the outset of life, can seldom or never get over

Delphine and Leonce have eight very bad typhus fevers between them, besides hæmoptoe, hemorrhage, deliquium animi, singultus, hysteria, and fœminei ululatus, or screams innumerable. Now, that there should be a reasonable allowance of sickness in every novel, we are willing to admit, and will cheerfully permit the heroine to be once given over, and at the point of death; but we cannot consent, that the interest which ought to be excited by the feelings of the mind should be transferred to the sufferings of the body, and a crisis of perspiration be substituted for a crisis of passion. Let us see difficulties overcome, if our approbation is required; we cannot grant it to such cheap and sterile artifices as these.

The characters in this novel are all said to be drawn from real life; and the persons for whom they are intended are loudly whispered at Paris. Most of them we have forgotten; but Delphine is said to be intended for the authoress, and Madame de Vernon (by a slight sexual metamorphosis) for Talleyrand, minister of the French republic for foreign affairs. As this lady (once the friend of the authoress) may probably exercise a considerable influence over the destinies of this country, we shall endeavour to make our readers a little better acquainted with her; but we must first remind them that she was once a bishop, a higher dignity in the church than was ever attained by any of her sex since the days of Pope Joan; and that though she swindles Delphine out of her estate with a considerable degree of address, her dexterity sometimes fails her, as in the memorable instance of the American commissioners. Madame de Staël gives the following description of this pastoral metropolitan female:

Though she is at least forty, she still appears charming