singularities. Lady Juliana Courtland, who makes a runaway match with Henry Douglas, and who, when cast off by her father, goes with her lapdogs and parrots to find a home with her husband's family in the Scotch Highlands, is only a super-accentuated expression of the weak, shallow, persistent selfishness of which the best society in all times and countries offers abundant examples. But she is skillfully differenced from other examples of the kind, and she passes through the story quite visibly and tangibly. The three old-maid sisters of the laird of Glenfern are eccentrics, without the inconsistency which distinguishes characters; they are as infallibly themselves as so many lunatics. Their devoutly admired Lady MacLaughlin, with her medicines and all her maxims, is also a type, inflexibly consistent, but capable of variation from her rude prepotency, in favor of the supercilious triviality of the English earl's daughter, who promptly tramples the obsequious pride of the poor ladies of Glenfern under her silk-shod feet. She is a true aristocrat in the unfailing assertion of her superiority, and they are true aristocrats in their acknowledgment of it. When her captivity in the abhorred Highlands comes to an end through the good offices of that old friend of her husband's who manages Douglas's recall to his regiment, and makes him an allowance, she gladly leaves one of her twin daughters behind her with the sister-in-law who adopts it; and with insolent exultation before her husband's family, she goes back to the spendthrift life in London from which her mistaken love-marriage had exiled her. She is studied in bold "black and white; and there is little shading used or needed in the portrayal of her growth from a selfish young woman of fashion into a selfish old woman of fashion.
One of the prime virtues with which an aristocracy supplies itself at the expense of the lower classes is frankness; and the frankness with which Lady Juliana and all her noble family discover their good and bad traits is shown with perhaps more mastery than anything else in the story. Her niece, Lady Emily, is rather a pleasing accident of the kindly patrician willfulness, such as Thackeray was fond of imagining; but neither she nor Lady Juliana's spoiled daughter Adelaide, nor her neglected daughter Mary, is the heroine of "Marriage." That is always Lady Juliana herself, who grudges letting Mary come to her for a few months, when the girl's health is failing in Scotland, as shamelessly as she refuses following her husband to India when his regiment is ordered away. She has never in her whole selfish life had a doubt of her right to the things she enjoys wasting, and has never had a regret except for a pleasure she has missed. She grows older very naturally; her caprice becomes obstinacy, her willfulness severity, her levity foolishness; she screeches, she scolds, she makes herself a bore and a nuisance. She is truly the incarnation of the meretricious spirit, and her instinct is to spoil and devour, to crave and to grudge.
II
Lady Juliana is as amusingly a warning as Emma Castlemain in Mrs. Opie's "Temper'' is intolerably an example. Few young women in fiction have been so offensively good, have had so few moments of passive virtue in which the reader could cease longing for their extirpation. It would be almost as hard to match her for the complications of her origin and destiny. She advances through the story, with a cloud upon the question of her mother's marriage which is lifted just in season to prevent her own marriage with her half- brother; and all this in no obscure lands or times, but in England and France, at such a recent date that she narrowly misses seeing the First Consul review his troops before the Tuileries. A foreign sojourn and an atmosphere of contemporaneous history seem to be necessary, in the author's view, to the development of a heroine who might have shown herself a prig, alternately sentimental and sarcastic, in far less formidable circumstances; but it cannot be honestly said that the political actualities are entertainingly employed in the story of Emma's love-affairs. As far as this story is an illustration of the social spirit of the first decade of the century, it fails to convey any hint of that revolt which stirs in Jane Austen's novels. In "Temper" there are some wicked people of good birth; but all the contemptible people are middle class or lower class. People in trade, or rich from trade, are invariably vulgar, as they are in "Evelina" and "Camilla" and "Cecilia," and there is no recognition of snobbery, because for that time, at least, the author is a snob, as dear Fanny Burney was apparently at all times.
The story is worthwhile chiefly as an instance of the prevailing literary tendency. It bears, in motive and object, an allegiance to the great school of nature which had flourished from the time of Richardson, but it refuses the simpler means by which the lessons of this school were enforced. It seeks its effects by tremendous feats of invention, by mysterious and prodigious accidents; and in this it forecasts the later moods of romanticism even more than it reflects the wild necromancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. In fact, I find myself disposed, not too strangely, I hope, to justify that poor lady's art, so long mocked and rejected, as something quite consistent in itself, as against the decadent naturalism of Mrs. Opie.
III
The heroines of Anne Radcliffe, who was born in 1764, may be claimed for our century, because their author did not die till 1823, and the romances, whose shades they still haunt, did not begin to appear until the last decade of the eighteenth century. Chief of those which still remain to touch or appall the reader, are "The House in the Forest,'' published in 1791, and "The Mysteries of Udolpho," published in 1794; and I have lately read both with a surprise I am not ashamed to confess at their vigorous handling of incident, and their fertility in gloomy and goose-fleshing situations. I can well understand why such an artist as Jane Austen must contest their universal acceptance, but I have not the least doubt she enjoyed them, and privately thrilled while she laughed at them. As literature they are distinctly not despicable, as Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," which presaged them, distinctly is. They abound in a poetry which makes itself felt nearly everywhere, except in the verse which they also abound in. They witness in the author a true feeling for nature, especially in the somber aspects, and an unquestionable power of logically relating the emotions of personality to these. Her tremendous schemes sometimes broke under her, and the reader is left to confront an anticlimax, instead of a veridical phantom; but all the same there is sublimity in the vastness of her schemes; a certain force in the conception of her types, and no slight grasp of the social facts of such countries as her travels had acquainted her with, or as she had studied from her husband's familiarity with them. Her Frenchmen and Italians are the Frenchmen and Italians of the prevailing Anglo-Saxon convention; but they are not therefore false, though they are inadequate and partial. Her villains are villains through and through, and never otherwise, and her good people always good, her fools always foolish, her sages always wise. Her heroines are never unworthy of their high mission of being rapt away by miscreants and held captive till their true lovers come to their relief. They have a gentle dignity, and a pious resignation in their trials, and at moments their emotions shape themselves in verse of indifferent quality. In any emergency they are apt to fall senseless, when it would be more convenient for them to command themselves; their morals are at all points unassailable; and under no stress will they yield to the voice of self-interest. Sometimes they are rather hard of hearing when common-sense speaks; yet they are by no means wanting in reason; and at the worst they are more probable and more lovable than such moralized heroines of the realistic decadence as Emma Castlemain. In "The Romance of the Forest" Adeline de Montalt is almost a personality, and in her most insubstantial moments she is pleasing or pathetic, as the case happens to be. She has to sustain the role of a young girl ignorant of her parentage, who is pursued by the passion of a profligate uncle, equally ignorant of her parentage, and is only fitfully and partially protected by a gentleman hiding from justice among the ruins of an ancient abbey in the heart of a gloomy forest on her uncle's estates. In circumstances which would be so difficult in real life, she has to suffer the jealousy of her uncertain protector's wife, and to forbid the suit of their son, an amiable youth not unworthy of the love which is won by another. But this situation is by no means impossible to the heroine, even when aggravated by her uncle's persecution of the excellent young officer to whom she gives her heart, and whom he manages to have sentenced to death for a breach of military discipline. One cannot be altogether surprised that she triumphs over her misfortunes, and is rewarded in the same moment by the reversal of her lover's sentence and the verification of her noble origin.
From the very beginning, indeed, one is taught to expect anything from
