Miss Porter placed her standard of excellence on high ground, and--all
gentle-spirited as was her nature--it was firm and unflinching toward
what she believed the right and true. We must not therefore judge
her by the depressed state of "feeling" in these times, when its
demonstration is looked upon as artificial or affected. Toward the
termination of the last, and the commencement of the present century,
the world was roused into an interest and enthusiasm, which now we
can scarcely appreciate or account for; the sympathies of England were
awakened by the terrible revolutions of France and the desolation of
Poland; as a principle, we hated Napoleon, though he had neither act
nor part in the doings of the democrats; and the sea-songs of Dibdin,
which our youth _now_ would call uncouth and ungraceful rhymes, were
key-notes to public feeling; the English of that time were thoroughly
"awake"--the British Lion had not slumbered through a thirty years'
peace. We were a nation of soldiers, and sailors, and patriots;
not of mingled cotton-spinners, and railway speculators, and angry
protectionists. We do not say which state of things is best or worst,
we desire merely to account for what may be called the taste for
_heroic_ literature at that time, and the taste for--we really hardly
know what to call it--literature of the present, made up, as it
too generally is, of shreds and patches--bits of gold and bits of
tinsel--things written in a hurry, to be read in a hurry, and never
thought of afterward--suggestive rather than reflective, at the best:
and we must plead guilty to a too great proneness to underrate what
our fathers probably overrated.

At all events we must bear in mind, while reading or thinking over
Miss Porter's novels, that in her day, even the exaggeration
of enthusiasm was considered good tone and good taste. How this
enthusiasm was _fostered_, not subdued, can be gathered by the