What a mortification to the inhabitants of a city with some hereditary and contemporary claims to cultivation; which has noble edifices, grand libraries, educational institutions of the highest grade, an art-gallery filled with the finest models and rich in paintings and statuary,—­a stately city that stretches both arms across the Charles to clasp the hands of Harvard, her twin-sister, each lending lustre to the other like double stars,—­what a pity that she should be so disfigured by crude attempts to adorn her and commemorate her past that her most loving children blush for her artificial deformities amidst the wealth of her natural beauties!  One hardly knows which to groan over most sadly,—­the tearing down of old monuments, the shelling of the Parthenon, the overthrow of the pillared temples of Rome, and in a humbler way the destruction of the old Hancock house, or the erection of monuments which are to be a perpetual eyesore to ourselves and our descendants.

We got talking on the subject of realism, of which so much has been said of late.

It seems to me, I said, that the great additions which have been made by realism to the territory of literature consist largely in swampy, malarious, ill-smelling patches of soil which had previously been left to reptiles and vermin.  It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.  The general consent of civilized people was supposed to have banished certain subjects from the conversation of well-bred people and the pages of respectable literature.  There is no subject, or hardly any, which may not be treated of at the proper time, in the proper place, by the fitting person, for the right kind of listener or reader.  But when the poet or the story-teller invades the province of the man of science, he is on dangerous ground.  I need say nothing of the blunders he is pretty sure to make.  The imaginative writer is after effects.  The scientific man is after truth.  Science is decent, modest; does not try to startle, but to instruct.  The same scenes and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the story teller’s highly colored paragraphs can be read without giving offence in the chaste language of the physiologist or the physician.

There is a very celebrated novel, “Madame Bovary,” the work of M. Flaubert, which is noted for having been the subject of prosecution as an immoral work.  That it has a serious lesson there is no doubt, if one will drink down to the bottom of the cup.  But the honey of sensuous description is spread so deeply over the surface of the goblet that a large proportion of its readers never think of its holding anything else.  All the phases of unhallowed passion are described in full detail.  That is what the book is bought and read for, by the great majority of its purchasers, as all but simpletons very well know.  That is what makes it sell and brought it into the courts of justice.  This book is famous