know in his heart that the best women--God bless them--lean, in
their characters, either to the sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the
sensitive and jealous affections of Helen? 'Tis Heaven, not you,
that made them so; and they are easily pardoned, both for being a
very little lower than the angels and for their gentle ambition to
be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps and
haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces in the
glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and Consuelo.
Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed
Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in the
portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?

That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a
snarling cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a
good woman: these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to
you, who were once so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend
against. A French critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do
preach too much. Did any author but yourself so frequently break
the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his
reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended. But who
that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of
the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers
your preaching to another's playing!

Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as
an ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the
Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions
of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to
yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes
of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on