It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remark as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were to read _Parthenissa_ for the story he would not, unless he were a very impulsive person, "hang himself." He would simply, after a number of pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.
[3] "Quant a moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se disent fort bien dites et tout a fait dignes de deux gentilhommes." The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting malice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merely because it is much shorter.

_Aretina_ or _The Serious Romance_, opens with an "apology for Romances" generally, which goes far to justify Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic.

But it cannot be said to be much--it is a little--more interesting as a story than _Parthenissa_, and it is written in a most singular lingo--not displaying the racy quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather terrible to peruse.

A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried with books." Somebody possesses, or is compared to "a cacochymick stomach, which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour." And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and "pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of that nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be thought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is more certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of the world, nor the man to walk in that way.
_Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both these books.

Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit him with, but he does not show it here.