hews the higher middle or even the higher
classes: though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of
her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper. But the law of
average and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed almost
invariably. Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was actually a
schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels get rather too much
the upper hand: and though she wrote good English, possessed no special
grace of style, and little faculty of illustration or ornament from
history, literature, her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most
harmless kind, and so forth. The result is that her books have a certain
dead-aliveness--that the characters, though actually alive, are neither
interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen had made hers, interesting in
their very uninterestingness. Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth
to nature and fact is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition
which the reader feels in the presence of actual _mimesis_--of creation
of fictitious fact and person. But this is not common: and the epithet
"dull," which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may
really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell. A "success
of esteem" is about the utmost that can be accorded her.

With Miss Yonge the case was very different. She was a lady of wide
reading and, even according to the modern rather arbitrary restrictions
of the term, something of an historical scholar; she had humour, of
which there was scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell's composition; she
had a very considerable understanding, and consequently some toleration
of the infinite varieties, and at least the more venial foibles, of
human temperament. She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue
which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she
had no command of the greater novelists' imagination in the creation of
character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of
what may be called the second or third class, in these respects. She
wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely
repeated herself. And her best books--the famous _Heir of Redclyffe_
(1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and
which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little
"unco-guidness," is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste,
and good form; _Heartsease_ (1854), perhaps the be