translated?  They are very clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and entertaining. . . .  Miss Austen’s—­are they translated?  They are not new, and are Dutch paintings of every-day people—­very clever, very true, very unaesthetic, but amusing.  I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell.  I hear it much admired—­and blamed.  It is one of the many proofs of the desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser insoluble moral problems.  George Sand has turned their heads in that direction.  I think a few broad scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding were very harmless in comparison.  They confounded nothing. . . .

The Heir of Redcliffe I have not read. . . .  I am not worthy of superhuman flights of virtue—­in a novel.  I want to see how people act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself.  Then I have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is:  Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without their help.

The Head of the Family has some merits . . .  But there is too much affliction and misery and frenzy.  The heroine is one of those creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be ‘shyed’ at (i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the worse for all the blows it has had—­nay, the better—­and that now, with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going to be quite happy.  No, fair ladies, you know that it is not so—­resigned, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out of such wrecks.

In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory.  Radicalism she detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as moribund.  ‘The Radical party is evidently effete,’ she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable ‘leader of the Tory party’ is Mr. Gladstone.  ’The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,’ she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says that the state of things in France fills ’me with the deepest anxiety on one point,—­the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our salvation as a nation turn.  Are our higher classes able to keep the lead of the rest?  If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear Charles Buller—­our turn must come.  Now Cambridge and Oxford must really look to this.’  The belief in the power of the Universities to stem the current of democracy is charming.  She grew to regard Carlyle as ’one of the dissolvents of the age—­as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be’; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as ‘pernicious’; and talks of John Stuart Mill as a ‘demagogue.’  She was no doctrinaire.  ’One ounce of education demanded