Nor was it advisable that they should.

Still they knew something--for example, that their new son-in-law was a
black man, which one would have thought might have struck them as
phenomenal. They take it, however, quite quietly and as a matter of
course. Now, surely, even among plumbers and glaziers, it must be
thought as strange for one's daughter to marry a black man as a lord.
Yet, out of this dramatic situation the author makes nothing at all, but
treats it as coolly as his _dramatis personae_ do themselves. Now _my_
notion would have been to make the bridegroom a black lord, and then to
portray, with admirable skill, the conflicting emotions of his
mother-in-law, disgusted on the one hand by his colour, attracted on the
other by his rank. But 'sensation' is evidently out of the line of the
penny novelist: he gives his facts, which are certainly remarkable, then
leaves both his characters and his readers to draw their own
conclusions.

The total absence of local scenery from these half hundred romances is
also curious, and becomes so very marked when the novelists are so
imprudent as to take their _dramatis personae_ out of England, that one
can't help wondering whether these gentlemen have ever been in foreign
parts themselves, or even read about them. Here is the conclusion of a
romance which leaves nothing to be desired in the way of brevity, but is
unquestionably a little abrupt and vague:

A year has passed away, and we are far from England and the English
climate.

Whither 'we' have gone the author does not say, nor even indicate the