Mrs. Jones,:—

Providence has bin pleased to make great halteration in the pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday three kiple chined by the grease of God in the holy bands of matter-money."

(The novel winds up with a general marriage of pretty much all parties concerned, mistress, maid, master and man); "and I now subscribe myself Loyd, at your sarvice." Here she of course describes the wedding. "As for Madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities—her head to be sure was fantastical; and her spouse had wrapped her with a long ... clock from the land of the selvedges.... Your humble servant had on a plain pea-green tabby sack, with my runnela cap, ruff toupee, and side-curls. They said I was the very moral of Lady Rickmanstone but not so pale—that may well be, for her ladyship is my elder by seven good years or more. Now, Mrs. Mary, our satiety is to suppurate; and we are coming home"—which irresistibly reminds us of the later Mrs. Malaprop's famous explanation in The Rivals:—"I was putrefied with astonishment."—"Present my compliments to Mrs. Gwillim, and I hope she and I will live upon dissent terms of civility. Being by God's blessing removed to a higher spear you'll excuse my being familiar with the lower sarvints of the family, but as I trust you will behave respectful and keep a proper distance you may always depend on the good will and protection of

Yours,

w. loyd."

To these I have now only to add the name of Lawrence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, in order to complete a group of novel writers whose moral outcome is much the same, and who are still reputed in all current manuals as the classic founders of English fiction. I need give no characterization of Sterne's book, which is probably best known of all the three. Every one recalls the Chinese puzzle of humor in Tristram Shandy, which pops something grotesque or indecent at us in every crook. As to its morality, I know good people who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, its teaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits, and may have a good many little private sins on his conscience, but will, nevertheless, be perfectly sure of heaven if he can have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of distress; or, in short, that a somewhat irritable state of the lachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a substitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice. As I have said, these four writers still maintain their position as the classic novelists, and their moral influence is still copiously extolled; but I cannot help believing that much of this praise is simply well meaning ignorance. I protest that I can read none of these books without feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable. In other words, they play upon life as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavor to get the most depressing tones possible from the instrument. This is done under pretext of showing us vice.

In fine, and this is the characterization I shall use in contrasting this group with that much sweeter group led by George Eliot, the distinctive feature of these first novelists is to show men with microscopic detail how bad men may be. I shall presently illustrate with the George Eliot group how much larger the mission of the novel is than this; meantime, I cannot leave this matter without recording, in the plainest terms, that, for far deeper reasons than those which Roger Bacon gave for sweeping away the works of Aristotle, if I had my way with these classic books I would blot them from the face of the earth. One who studies the tortuous behaviors of men in history soon ceases to wonder at any human inconsistency; but, so far as I can marvel, I do daily that we regulate by law the sale of gunpowder, the storage of nitro-glycerine, the administration of poison—all of which can hurt but our bodies—but are absolutely careless of these things—so-called classic books, which wind their infinite insidiousnesses about the souls of our young children, and either strangle them or cover them with unremovable slime under our very eyes, working in a security of fame and so-called classicism that is more effectual for this purpose than the security of the dark. Of this terror it is the sweetest souls who know most.

In the beginning of Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Browning speaks this matter so well that I must clinch my opinion with her words. Aurora Leigh says, recalling her own youthful experience:

"Sublimest danger, over which none weep,
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,
You clap hands—'A fair day!'—you cheer him on
As if the worst could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain. Yet behold,
Behold!—the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
Our spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness....
... In the book-world, true,
There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings...
True, many a prophet teaches in the roads ...
But stay—who judges?...
... The child there? Would you leave
That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns?
Or even in the catacombs—his torch
Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all
The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!"

But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightful to find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the classics. In the year 1766 appeared Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield.