picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so
humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same
time, to render it the more difficult of attainment.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral
purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be
deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself
with a moral,--the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one
generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself
of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable
mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this
romance might effectually convince mankind--or, indeed, any one
man--of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold,
or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby
to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be
scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however,
he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the
slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach
anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually
through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one.
The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore,
relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron
rod,--or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,
--thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen
in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed,
fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every
step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction,
may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom
any more evident, at the last page than at the first.