= ROWCROFT ' S BUSHRANGER OF VAN DIEMEN'S LAND.
Nra. Rowcaorr yras exhausted by his first fiction ; or rather, the freshness of a settler's life in a new colony, and the accident which indu- ced the writer to adhere in the main to its daily character, gave novel- ty and interest to The Adventures of an Emigrant, in despite of the author's deficiencies as a novelist. His coarseness of mind and want of imagination were not felt ; or they fell in with the nature of his sub- jects, as did a certain literalness of style. He had also the good sense, as we observed at the time, "not to transplant romance" to a penal settle- ment. This, in the lack of better matter, he has now attempted ; and chosen a commodity of the most vulgar kind. Folly and felonry are the staple materials of The Bushranger of Van Diemen's land, strung together by an exaggeration of the improbabilities of the Minerva Press.
The leading idea of The Bushranger is derived from the practice of Cooper ; who has occasionally made a single action the germ of his ro- mance, engrafting a series of incidents upon the pursuit of one vessel by another—as in Homeward Bound, or an abduction by Red Indians with its consequences—as in several of his land tales. In like manner, Mr. Rowcroft makes the abduction of his heroine, first by Mark Brandon, a villain of most wonderful abilities and accomplishments, and next by a tribe of Natives, the entire subject of his three volumes ; but without the variety and relief which an artist imparts to his picture. In venturing upon this difficult ground, Mr. Rowcroft seems to have forgotten that Cooper is a man of expanded views and critical acumen, with a large knowledge of nautical, settlement, and Red Indian life and nature ; able to select incidents which represent, or seem to represent, the general charac- ter of the life he is delineating, and which are at once striking and probable. The. American has also imagination to elevate and generalize his indi- viduals; taste sufficient to avoid the low, and stop short of the offensive ; and, whatever may be reported by modern observers of the Red Indians in their present condition, the older tribes are embalmed, in idea, as the noblest specimens of wild humanity—as they probably were in fact. Their honour and sagacity have furnished illustrations for philosophers like Franklin; they have been the theme of orators and the subjects of music and poetry; "if we have writ our annals true," they combined some- thing of heroic grandeur and chivalrous honour with a power of endur- ance as a race, which only an occasional martyr or philosopher has been able to attain in civilized society.
" Trailed from his tree-rock'd cradle to his bier, The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook Impassive, fearing but the shame of fear;
A stoic of the woods—a man without a tear."
It is a poor sort of imitation to substitute for characters such as these, the wretched half-animals of Van Diemen's Land—the lowest of the human race—or the blackguardism, drunkenness, 'and lust of convicted felons. Neither are they truly painted. The folly and misconception by which the Bushrangers are permitted to get possession of the vessel in which the heroine is embarked, and, when driven from the ship, the neglect by which the Bushranger is permitted to carry her off, for the sake of Mr. Rowcroft's story, are morally impossible. Some of the other adventures may have happened singly, (though not in connexion,) just as Dels.rue's murder happened; but they give about as good an idea of the proba- bilities of life in Van Diemen's Land as the last would do of life in London.
It is only, however, for certain general outlines that Mr. Rowcroft is indebted to Cooper or his followers. His filling-up is altogether pla- giarized from the playhouse. The reader may form a very sufficient idea of The Bushranger if he has ever had to sit out a " spectacle" whose scene is laid in some "savage" country. There is a hero-lover, a not very striking personage, played by the "walking gentleman " ; there is a heroine, rather clever and scheming ; there is of course a "deep," plausible, but atrocious villain, whose readiness and craft are encountered by such surpassing feebleness that common sense is sickened ; and lastly, there is a Cockney transplanted from Bow Bells, and done by the buffoon of the company, to "make sport" by his ignorance of the products of the land and his terrors of the "Natives." A Mr. Silliman is this character in The Bushranger : among other " humours," he tumbles into a den of opossums in a hollow tree, that bite and scratch him till his roars occasion a false alarm,—wherein would seem to lie the jest ; and when he falls into the hands of a Native tribe, an elderly lady gets in love with him and insists upon marriage. There is a sort of untiring vigour in the style, and a species of clever- ness in the management of the narrative : but the story is unrelieved by the slightest trace of imagination, and the tone is that of the coarse colonist. This is perhaps all explainable by the object of the author,— which was to dissipate "a dangerous notion, prevalent among those es- pecially where a misconception of the truth is most mischievous, that a transportation to the penal colonies is not, as the law intends, a punishment." What select circle of novel-readers was to profit by this delicate moral, may be divined : but even for them it fails, since they do not, we imagine, place bushranging among the wealth-creating pur- suits. "The height of this great argument," however, enables Mr. Row- croft to achieve the only bits of natural and truthful writing in his book, —misgivings of the " felonry " as to their reciprocal trustworthiness when rewards are offered for their apprehension ; and the physical suf- ferings of a well-hunted bushranger. But the melodramatic haunts hint even here. He cannot let his hero die a natural death. Wounded, ex- hausted, without food, and in continual dread of his pursuers, Mr. Mark Brandon is not allowed to lie down and die, but is eaten alive by an eagle; which, as a finale, drops him into a burning forest !•
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