In his next novel Mackenzie described the counterpart of Harley, “The Man of the World.”  Almost any writer of the present day who took a man of the world for his hero, would draw him as a calm, philosophical person, neither very good nor very bad,—­one who took the pleasures and troubles of life as they came, without quarrelling with either.  But the man of the world as Mackenzie paints him, and as the eighteenth century made him, was quite another individual.  Sir Thomas Sindall is a villain of the heroic type.  Not one, simply, who does all the injury and commits all the crimes which chance brings in his way.  He labors with a ceaseless persistency, and a resolution which years do not diminish, to seduce a single woman.  Without any apparent passion, he finally accomplishes his object by force, after having spent several years in ruining her brother to prevent his interference.  The long periods of time, the great expenditure of vital energy, and the exhaustless fund of brutality which are consumed by the fictitious villains of the eighteenth century in gratifying what would seem merely a passing inclination, astonish the reader of to-day.  The crime of rape, rarely now introduced into fiction, and rarely figuring even in criminal courts, is a common incident in old novels, and as commonly, remains unpunished.  In Sir Thomas Sindall, Mackenzie meant to present a contrast to the delicate and benevolent character of Harley.  Both are extremes, the one of sensibility, the other of brutality.  Harley was a new creation, but Sindall quite a familiar person, with whom all readers of the novels of the last century have often associated.

It was suggested very sensibly to Mackenzie, that the interest of most works of fiction depended on the designing villainy of one or more characters, and that in actual life calamities were more often brought about by the innocent errors of the sufferers.  To place this view before his readers, Mackenzie wrote “Julia de Roubigne,” in which a wife brings death upon herself and her husband by indiscreetly, though innocently, arousing his jealousy.  Sir Walter Scott ranked this novel among the “most heart-wringing histories” that ever were written—­a description which justly becomes it.  Mackenzie’s aim was less to weave a complicated plot, than to study and move the heart; and to the lover of sentiment his novels may still be attractive.

The “Fool of Quality,” by Henry Brooke, has had a singular history.  The author was a young Irishman of a fine figure, a well-stored mind, and a disposition of particular gentleness.  He was loved by Pope and Lyttleton, caressed by the Prince of Wales, and honored by the friendly interest of Jonathan Swift.  Married before he was twenty-one to a young girl who presented him with three children before she was eighteen, his life was a constant struggle to provide for a family which increased with every year.  After a long period of active life, passed in literary occupations, he retired to an obscure