ish when not required. You will
rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who is diffident
of her ability to decide on theological questions--who has any suspicion
that she is not capable of discriminating with the nicest accuracy
between the good and evil in all church parties--who does not see
precisely how it is that men have gone wrong hitherto--and pity
philosophers in general that they have not had the opportunity of
consulting her. Great writers, who have modestly contented themselves
with putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite a
sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she sighs over as
deplorably deficient in the application of their powers. "They have
solved no great questions"--and she is ready to remedy their omission by
setting before you a complete theory of life and manual of divinity in a
love story, where ladies and gentlemen of good family go through genteel
vicissitudes, to the utter confusion of Deists, Puseyites, and
ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect establishment of that peculiar view
of Christianity which either condenses itself into a sentence of small
caps, or explodes into a cluster of stars on the three hundred and
thirtieth page. It is true, the ladies and gentlemen will probably seem
to you remarkably little like any you have had the fortune or misfortune
to meet with, for, as a general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to
describe actual life and her fellow-men is in inverse proportion to her
confident eloquence about God and the other world, and the means by which
she usually chooses to conduct you to true ideas of the invisible is a
totally false picture of the visible.

As typical a novel of the oracular kind as we can hope to meet with, is
"The Enigma: a Leaf from the Chronicles of the Wolchorley House." The
"enigma" which this novel is to solve is certainly one that demands
powers no less gigantic than those of a lady novelist, being neither more
nor less than the existence of evil. The problem is stated and the
answer dimly foreshadowed on the very first page. The spirited young
lady, with raven hair, says, "All life is an inextricable confusion;" and
the meek young lady, with auburn hair, looks at the picture of the
Madonna which she is copying, and--"_There_ seemed the solution of that
mighty enigma." The style of this novel is quite as lofty as its
purpose; indeed, some passages on which we have spent much patient s