on the whole, and family life as a rule, as sweet and good as they are, the mirror is not held up to nature, but more likely reflects a morbid mind.  Still it must be added that the study of unfortunate social conditions is a legitimate one for the author to make; and that we may be in no state to judge justly of his exposure while the punishment is being inflicted, or while the irritation is fresh.  For, no doubt, the reader winces often because the novel reveals to himself certain possible baseness, selfishness, and meanness.  Of this, however, I (speaking for myself) may be sure:  that the artist who so represents vulgar life that I am more in love with my kind, the satirist who so depicts vice and villainy that I am strengthened in my moral fibre, has vindicated his choice of material.  On the contrary, those novelists are not justified whose forte it seems to be to so set forth goodness as to make it unattractive.

But we come back to the general proposition that the indispensable condition of the novel is that it shall entertain.  And for this purpose the world is not ashamed to own that it wants, and always will want, a story—­a story that has an ending; and if not a good ending, then one that in noble tragedy lifts up our nature into a high plane of sacrifice and pathos.  In proof of this we have only to refer to the masterpieces of fiction which the world cherishes and loves to recur to.

I confess that I am harassed with the incomplete romances, that leave me, when the book is closed, as one might be on a waste plain at midnight, abandoned by his conductor, and without a lantern.  I am tired of accompanying people for hours through disaster and perplexity and misunderstanding, only to see them lost in a thick mist at last.  I am weary of going to funerals, which are not my funerals, however chatty and amusing the undertaker may be.  I confess that I should like to see again the lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great passion and a great sacrifice; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to the verge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her to wasting sicknesses even, if he only brings her out at the end in a blissful compensation of her troubles, and endued with a new and sweeter charm.  No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in the novel of society the destiny should be decided by character.  What an artistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd and wicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel that there was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix of Henry Esmond!  It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious.  It is wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see it in society.  It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the pageantry of honored obsequies.  Yet