who perished
in puffing her. Some persons of rank and fashion have a taste for the
society of some men of letters, but nothing in the way of literary
puffery seems to come of it. Of course many critics like to give their
friends and acquaintances an applausive hand, and among their
acquaintances may be ladies of fashion who write novels; but we read
nowhere such extraordinary adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady
Fanny. The fashionable authoress is nearly extinct, though some persons
write well albeit they are fashionable. The fashionable novel is as dead
as a door nail: _Lothair_ was nearly the last of the species. There are
novelists who write about "Society," to be sure, like Mr. Norris; but
their tone is quite different. They do not speak as if Dukes and Earls
were some strange superior kind of beings; their manner is that of men
accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing for readers who do not care
whether the hero is a lord or a commoner. They are "at ease," though not
terribly "in Zion." Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peerage,
but it cannot be said that he is always at ease in their society. He
remembers that they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and
suspicious and sarcastic, except, perhaps when he deals with a gentleman
like Lord Kew. He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin
des Plantes. He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the
lion; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a title. Mr.
Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood. Mr. Trollope was not
afraid of his Dukes: he thought none the worse of a man because he was
the high and puissant prince of Omnium. As for most novelists, they no
longer paint fashionable society with enthusiasm. Mr. Henry James has
remarked that young British peers favour the word "beastly,"--a point
which does not always impress itself into other people so keenly as into
Mr. Henry James. In reading him you do not forget that his Tufts are
Tufts. But then Tufts are really strange animals to the denizens of the
Great Republic. Perhaps the modern realism has made novelists desert the
world where Dukes and Dowagers abound. Novelists do not know very much
about it; they are not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer
to write about the manners which they know. A very good novel, in these
strange ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but nobody
writes it, and, if a