The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, consisting of Wieland;or, The transformation. Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the year 1793. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a sleep-walker. Jane Talbot. Ormond; or, The secret witness. Clara Howard; or, The enthusiasm of love. With a memoir of the author.

.

120 ORMOND; OR,
limited by nature. This mortifying thought was outbalanced by another. Her attainments, indeed, were
suitable to the imbecility of her sex; but did she not
surpass, in those attainments, the ordinary rate of
women? They must not be condemned because they
are outshone by qualities that are necessarily male
births.
Her accomplishments formed a much more attractive
theme. He overlooked no article in the catalogue. He
was confounded at one time, and encouraged at another,
on remarking the contradictions that seemed to be included in her character. It was difficult to conceive the
impossibility of passing that barrier which yet she was
able to touch. She was no poet. She listened to the
rehearsal without emotion, or was moved, not by the
substance of the passage, by the dazzling image or the
magic sympathy, but by something gdscititious; yet
usher her upon the stage, and no poet would wish for a
more powerful organ of his conceptions. In assuming
this office, she appeared to have drank in the very soul
of the dramatist. What was wanting in judgment was
supplied by memory, in the tenaciousness of which she
has seldom been rivalled.
Her sentiments were trite and undigested, but were
decorated with all the fluences and melodies of elocution. Her musical instructor had been a Sicilian, who
had formed her style after the Italian model. This man
had likewise taught her his own language. He had
supplied her chiefly with Sicilian compositions, both in
poetry and melody, and was content to be unclassical
for the sake of the feminine and voluptuous graces of his
native dialect.
Ormond was an accurate judge of the proficiency of
Helena, and of the felicity with which these accomplishments were suited to her character. When his pupil
personated the victims of anger and grief, and poured
forth the fiery indignation of Calista, or the maternal
despair of Constance, or the self-contentions of Ipsipile,
he could not deny the homage which her talents might
claim.
Her Sicilian tutor had found her no less tractable as