Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys —­ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical importance.  With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant Italian musicians, maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus and Scopas, is the more admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the corner.  When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where are your Emmas and Elizabeths?  Your volumes neither excite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States, as well as in France and at home.

You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open.  Knowing Lydia and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost insignificant characters?  With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even now, in the circulating library.  How Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped:  all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites of our time.  Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary’s legs and the softness of Kitty’s cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham’s whiskers, you would have left a romance still dear to young ladies.

Or again, you might entrance your students still, had you concentrated your attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henrv Crawford.  These should have been the chief figures of ‘Mansfield Park.’  But you timidly decline to tackle Passion.  ‘Let other pens,’ you write, ’dwell on guilt and misery.  I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.’  Ah, there is the secret of your failure!  Need I add that the vulgarity and narrowness of the social circles you describe impair your popularity?  I scarce remember more than one lady of title, and but very few lords (and these unessential) in all your tales.  Now, when we all wish to be in society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and we get lords (and very queer lords) even from Republican authors, born in a country which in your time was not renowned for its literature.  I have heard a critic remark, with a decided air of fashion, on the brevity of the notice which your characters give each other when they