book being just sufficiently remote from every-day to preserve the unities of the supposition.  Gradually this theory was sought to be displaced by one concerning a German baroness acquainted neither with Jews nor with music, humored as it was by that foreign trick in the book, the idioms of another tongue; but the latter theory was too false on its face to be tenable, and then people left off caring about it.  It is perhaps an idle infirmity, this request for the personality of authors; yet it is indeed a response to the fact that there never was one who did not prefer to be esteemed for himself rather than for his writing,—­and, ascending, may we love the works of God and not the Lord himself?  However, none were a whit the wiser for knowing Miss Sheppard’s name.  It came to be accepted that we were to have the books,—­whence was no matter; they were so new, so strange, so puzzling,—­the beautiful, the quaint, and the faulty were so interwoven, that nobody cared to separate these elements, to take the trouble to criticize or to thank; and thus, though we all gladly enough received, we kept our miserly voices to ourselves, and she never met with any adequate recognition.  After her first book, England quietly ignored her,—­they could not afford to be so startled; as Sir Leicester Dedlock said, “It was really—­really—­“; she did very well for the circulating libraries; and because Mr. Mudie insists on his three volumes or none at all, she was forced to extend her rich webs to thinness.  It is this alone that injures “Counterparts” for many;—­not that they would not gladly accept the clippings in a little supplementary pamphlet, but dissertations, they say, delay the action.  In this case, though, that is not true; for, besides the incompleteness of the book without the objectionable dissertation, (that long conversation between Miss Dudleigh and Sarona,) it answers the purpose of very necessary by-play on the stage during preparation for the last and greatest scene.  But had this been a fault, it was not so much hers as the publishers’.  Subject to the whims of those in London, and receiving no reply to the communication of her wishes from those in Edinburgh, she must have experienced much injustice at the hands of her booksellers, and her title-pages show them to have been perpetually changed.  She herself accepts with delight propositions from another quarter of the globe; the prospect of writing for those across the water was very enticing to her; and in one of her letters she says,—­“It is my greatest ambition to publish in America,—­to have no more to do personally with English publishers”; and finding it, after serious illness, impossible to fulfil this engagement in season, the anxiety, regret, and subsequent gratitude, which she expressed, evinced that she had been unaccustomed to the courteous consideration then received.