s himself as a
quack physician and enters into general practice, foreseeing that Evelyn
will fall ill, and that he shall be called in to attend her. At last,
when all his schemes are frustrated, he takes leave of her in a long
letter, written, as you will perceive from the following passage,
entirely in the style of an eminent literary man:

"Oh, lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, will you ever cast one
thought upon the miserable being who addresses you? Will you ever,
as your gilded galley is floating down the unruffled stream of
prosperity, will you ever, while lulled by the sweetest music--thine
own praises--hear the far-off sigh from that world to which I am
going?"

On the whole, however, frothy as it is, we rather prefer "Rank and
Beauty" to the two other novels we have mentioned. The dialogue is more
natural and spirited; there is some frank ignorance and no pedantry; and
you are allowed to take the heroine's astounding intellect upon trust,
without being called on to read her conversational refutations of
sceptics and philosophers, or her rhetorical solutions of the mysteries
of the universe.

Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably unanimous in
their choice of diction. In their novels there is usually a lady or
gentleman who is more or less of a upas tree; the lover has a manly
breast; minds are redolent of various things; hearts are hollow; events
are utilized; friends are consigned to the tomb; infancy is an engaging
period; the sun is a luminary that goes to his western couch, or gathers
the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom; life is a melancholy boon;
Albion and Scotia are conversational epithets. There is a striking
resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for
instance, as that "It is a fact, no less true than melancholy, that all
people, more or less, richer or poorer, are swayed by bad example;" that
"Books, however trivial, contain some subjects from which useful
information may be drawn;" that "Vice can too often borrow the language
of virtue;" that "Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be
accepted, for clamor and pretension cannot impose upon those too well
read in human nature to be easily deceived;" and that "In order to
forgive, we must have been injured." There is doubtless a class of
readers to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent; for
we often find them doubly and trebly scored with the pencil,