generally succeed better in the construction of plots and the delineation of character.  Such a novel as Tom Jones or Vanity Fair we shall not get from a woman, nor such an effort of imaginative history as Ivanhoe or Old Mortality; but Fielding, Thackeray and Scott are equally excluded from such perfection in its kind as Pride and Prejudice, Indiana or Jane Eyre.  As an artist Jane Austen surpasses all the male novelists that ever lived; and for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand.

We are here led to another curious point in our subject, viz., the influence of sorrow upon female literature.  It may be said without exaggeration that almost all literature has some remote connection with suffering.  “Speculation,” said Novalis, “is disease.”  It certainly springs from a vague disquiet.  Poetry is analogous to the pearl which the oyster secretes in its malady.

                       “Most wretched men
      Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
      They learn in suffering what they teach in song.”

What Shelley says of poets, applies with greater force to women.  If they turn their thoughts to literature, it is—­when not purely an imitative act—­always to solace by some intellectual activity the sorrow that in silence wastes their lives, and by a withdrawal of the intellect from the contemplation of their pain, or by a transmutation of their secret anxieties into types, they escape from the pressure of that burden.  If the accidents of her position make her solitary and inactive, or if her thwarted affections shut her somewhat from that sweet domestic and maternal sphere to which her whole being spontaneously moves, she turns to literature as to another sphere.  We do not here simply refer to those notorious cases where literature was taken up with the avowed and conscious purpose of withdrawing thoughts from painful subjects; but to the unconscious, unavowed influence of domestic disquiet and unfulfilled expectations, in determining the sufferer to intellectual activity.  The happy wife and busy mother are only forced into literature by some hereditary organic tendency, stronger even than the domestic; and hence it is that the cleverest women are not those who have written books.

In the later essay on “Silly Novels” her powers of sarcasm were fully displayed.  It showed keen critical powers, and a clear insight into the defects inherent in most novel-writing.  She spared no faults, had no mercy for presumption, and condemned unsparingly the pretence of culture.  She described four kinds of silly novels, classing them as being of the mind-and-millinery, the oracular, the white-neck-cloth_, and the modern-antique varieties.  All her powers of analysis and insight shown in her novels appeared in this article.