surprise at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not
shortcomings that impair its supreme effect. This, I take it, is
the intimation of a mystical authority in marriage against which
divorce sins in vain, which no recreancy can subvert, and by
virtue of which it claims eternally its own the lovers united in
it; though they seem to become haters, it cannot release them to
happiness in a new union through any human law.

If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly
dramatic) no more than this, he would have established his right
to be taken seriously, but he has done very much more, and has
made us acquainted with types and characters which we do not
readily forget, and with characters much more real than their
ambient. For instance, the Old Cambridge in which the Vassalls
live is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are the
Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls in which they dwell
are of a baroniality difficult of verification. Their honor,
their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though their
social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary
experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its
difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely
suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in
which it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the
heroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passed
away, and actually of the newer Boston which will not be so much
regretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdy
Boston, the decadent Boston. It is, of course, a Boston much
worse in the report than in the fact, but it is not unimaginably
bad to the student who notes that the lapse from any high ideals
is to a level lower than that of people who have never had them.