written under totally
different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to
a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the
working-classes except as "dependents;" they think five hundred a year a
miserable pittance; Belgravia and "baronial halls" are their primary
truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not
at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear
that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby
pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and
inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is
true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in
their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but
then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If
their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men,
tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to
have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they _have_ seen
and heard, and what they have _not_ seen and heard, with equal
unfaithfulness.

There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen something of children
under five years of age, yet in "Compensation," a recent novel of the
mind-and-millinery species, which calls itself a "story of real life," we
have a child of four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic
fashion:

"'Oh, I am so happy, dear grand mamma;--I have seen--I have seen such
a delightful person; he is like everything beautiful--like the smell
of sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lemond;--or no, _better than
that_--he is like what I think of and see when I am very, very happy;
and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings; and his forehead is
like _that distant sea_,' she continued, pointing to the blue
Mediterranean; 'there seems no end--no end; or like the clusters of
stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night. . . . Don't look
so . . . your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the wind is blowing
and the sun is gone in; I like the sunshine best when the lake is
smooth. . . . So now--I like it better than ever . . . It is more
beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, _when the
sun suddenly lights up all the colors of the forests and shining
purple rocks_, _and it is all reflected in the waters b