It would interest you as well as me to note little points of manners that are to be gathered from the three books.  I have not time to write much more, but will tell you two or three that have struck me.  If you read them, as I still hope you may, you will see what early risers they all are, even the wicked Mr. B.; while Clarissa, when in Dover Street, usually gives Lovelace his interviews at six in the morning.  One hears of two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage.  How much more wonderful is love that rises at six!

Richardson was a woman’s novelist, as Fielding was a man’s.  I sometimes think of Dr. Johnson’s mot:  “Claret for boys, port for men, and,” smiling, “brandy for heroes.”  So one might fancy him saying:  “Richardson for women, Fielding for men, Smollett for ruffians,” though some of his rough customers were heroes, too.  But we now confine ourselves so closely to “the later writers” of Russia, France, England, America, that the woman who reads Richardson may be called heroic.  “To the unknown heroine” I dedicate my respect, as the Athenians dedicated an altar to “the unknown hero.”  Will you be the heroine?  I am afraid you won’t!

GERARD DE NERVAL

To Miss Girton, Cambridge.

Dear Miss Girton,—­Yes, I fancy Gerard de Nerval is one of that rather select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow you to read.  But even if you read him, I do not think you will care very much for him.  He is a man’s author, not a woman’s; and yet one can hardly say why.  It is not that he offends “the delicacy of your sex,” as Tom Jones calls it; I think it is that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not of the kind you like.  Let it be admitted that, when his characters make love, they might do it “in a more human sort of way.”

In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nerval resembles Edgar Poe.  Not that his heroes are always attached to a belle morte in some distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the family sepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud—­no, Aurelie and Sylvie, in Les Filles de Feu, are nice and natural girls; but their lover is not in love with them “in a human sort of way.”  He is in love with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him.  He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the old chateau, or the farmer’s cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path.  Nothing can make him pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who rested never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding them true.