This is the type which, without comprehending it, the intellectual women of America are continually striving to depict in their novels; and a pretty mess they make of it, my boy,—a pretty mess they make of it.
Their "Rochester" hero is harder to understand than Hamlet, when he falls into the hands of our school-girl authoresses. He looms rakishly upon us, my boy, a horridly misanthropic wretch, despising the world with all the dreadful malignity of chronic dyspepsia, and displaying a degree of moral biliousness truly horrifying to members of the church. His behavior to the poor little heroine is a perpetual outrage. Alternately he caresses and snubs her. He never fails to make her read to him when he traps her in the library; and when she says, "Good night" to him he is too deep in a "fit of gloomy abstraction" to answer her civilly. If he calls her a "little fool," her fondness for him becomes ecstatic: and at the first hint of his having murdered a noble brother and two beautiful sisters in early life, she is led to fear that her adoration of him will exceed the love she owes to her Maker!
This unprincipled ruffian may be separated from the virtuous little heroine for years, and be flirting consumedly with half a dozen crinolines when next she sees him; yet is he loved dearly by the virtuous little heroine all the time, and when last we hear of him, she is resting peacefully upon his vest-pattern.
What makes the inconsistency of the whole story still more apparent, is the intense and double-refined piety of the heroine, as contrasted with an utter stagnation of all morality in the breast of the ruffian. How the two can assimilate, I do not understand; and my misunderstanding is wofully augmented by the heroine's frequent expressions of churchliness, and the ruffian's equally frequent outbursts of waggish infidelity.
And now, my boy, let me transcribe for you the new novel, sent to me with such kind intent by one of the young and intellectual women of America. You will find much lusciousness of sentiment, my boy, in
HIGGINS.
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
BY GUSHALINA CRUSHIT.
PREFACE.
In writing the ensuing pages, I have been guided by no motives other than those which lead the mind, in its leisure hours, to scatter the germs of the beautiful. It may be urged that the character of my hero is unnatural; but I am sure there are many of my sex who will discover in Mr. Higgins a counter-part of the ideal of days when life still knew the odors of its first spring, and the soul of man seemed to the eye of innocence an elysium of virtue into which no gangrene of mere worldliness intruded. I have done.