society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and
we get lords (and very queer lords) even from Republican authors,
born in a country which in your time was not renowned for its
literature. I have heard a critic remark, with a decided air of
fashion, on the brevity of the notice which your characters give
each other when they offer invitations to dinner. "An invitation to
dinner next day was despatched," and this demonstrates that your
acquaintance "went out" very little, and had but few engagements.
How vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy "keep
his breath to cool his porridge." I blush for Elizabeth! It were
superfluous to add that your characters are debased by being
invariably mere members of the Church of England as by law
established. The Dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that glides
from Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher
Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look for in vain among your
studies of character. Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown
sound to you; so how can you help us in the stress of the soul's
travailings?

You may say that the soul's travailings are no affair of yours;
proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the
duty of the novelist. I only remember one reference, in all your
works, to that controversy which occupies the chief of our
attention--the great controversy on Creation or Evolution. Your
Jane Bennet cries: "I have no idea of there being so much Design in
the world as some persons imagine." Nor do you touch on our mighty
social question, the Land Laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a
Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty "of settling
an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man
whom nobody cared anything about." There, madam, in that cruelly