we may call the _white neck-cloth_ species, which
represent the tone of thought and feeling in the Evangelical party. This
species is a kind of genteel tract on a large scale, intended as a sort
of medicinal sweetmeat for Low Church young ladies; an Evangelical
substitute for the fashionable novel, as the May Meetings are a
substitute for the Opera. Even Quaker children, one would think, can
hardly have been denied the indulgence of a doll; but it must be a doll
dressed in a drab gown and a coal-scuttle-bonnet--not a worldly doll, in
gauze and spangles. And there are no young ladies, we imagine--unless
they belong to the Church of the United Brethren, in which people are
married without any love-making--who can dispense with love stories.
Thus, for Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in
which the vicissitudes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving
views of Regeneration and the Atonement. These novels differ from the
oracular ones, as a Low Churchwoman often differs from a High
Churchwoman: they are a little less supercilious and a great deal more
ignorant, a little less correct in their syntax and a great deal more
vulgar.

The Orlando of Evangelical literature is the young curate, looked at from
the point of view of the middle class, where cambric bands are understood
to have as thrilling an effect on the hearts of young ladies as
epaulettes have in the classes above and below it. In the ordinary type
of these novels the hero is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned
upon, perhaps by worldly mammas, but carrying captive the hearts of their
daughters, who can "never forget _that_ sermon;" tender glances are
seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera-box; _tete-a-tetes_
are seasoned with quotations from Scripture instead of quotations from
the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine's affections are
mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul. The young curate
always has a background of well-dressed and wealthy if not fashionable
society--for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of
silliness--and the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains to you
the type of the scapegoat on one page, is ambitious on another to
represent the manners and conversations of aristocratic people. Her
pictures of fashionable society are often curious studies, considered as
efforts of the Evangelical imagination; but in one particular the novels
of the