To this there is no special objection.  Every man has a right to heap virtues and graces upon his hero, and to heighten their effect by as much uncouthness and insincerity as he chooses to attribute to the subordinates; but so far as he professes to represent life, he should keep within the bounds of natural laws.  If he chooses to introduce time-honored personages, we shall not quarrel with him, although we certainly think it desirable that some fresh piquancy in their characters shall be the vindication of their reappearance.  We may regret that a subtle, but palpable ridicule is cast upon foreign missions,—­a cause which, whether successful or unsuccessful in its immediate objects, will forever stand recorded as one of the most unselfish, the most sublime, and the most Christ-like movements that have ever been originated by man.  The hero does, indeed, patronize them to the extent of saying that he has “seen something of your missions in India, and believes that they are capable of accomplishing much good,”—­adding, however, lest his words excite hopes too sanguine, “Still, you must not expect immediate returns.  It is only the lowest caste that is now reached, and the Christianizing of India must come, eventually, from the highest,”—­words which we shall be very ready to take as opinion, but very slow to receive as oracle, since, from the time when the Founder of Christianity was upon the earth, and the common people heard him gladly, while the higher classes thrust him out of their synagogues, till the present day, the history of Christianity has been the history of an influence rising from the lower layers of society into the upper, rather than filtering down from the upper into the lower.

Since, also, however vulgarly the Grindles may put it, it is true that drunkenness is the agony of wives, the dread of mothers,—­that it does destroy hopes, desolate hearths, break hearts,—­that within the last two years it has added to its terrible deeds wide disasters to our arms, long sorrow to our country, and fruitless death in a thousand households,—­we think it would have been well, if the discredit cast upon temperance measures, and the discomfiture visited upon its advocates, had been accompanied by a less covert recognition of the evil and by a more obvious sympathy with its victims.  Since the methods taken to insure self-control are insufficient, would it not have been possible to indicate better?  Since Woodbury does not think abstinence to be the cure of intemperance, could he not justify his practice by a higher principle than self-indulgence, lay it on a deeper foundation than dilettanteism?

We regret, also, that in a book by Bayard Taylor there should have been found room for such a paragraph as this:—­