White Neck-cloth School are meritoriously realistic--their
favorite hero, the Evangelical young curate, is always rather an insipid
personage.

The most recent novel of this species that we happen to have before us is
"The Old Grey Church." It is utterly tame and feeble; there is no one
set of objects on which the writer seems to have a stronger grasp than on
any other; and we should be entirely at a loss to conjecture among what
phases of life her experience has been gained, but for certain vulgarisms
of style which sufficiently indicate that she has had the advantage,
though she has been unable to use it, of mingling chiefly with men and
women whose manners and characters have not had all their bosses and
angles rubbed down by refined conventionalism. It is less excusable in
an Evangelical novelist than in any other, gratuitously to seek her
subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of
Evangelicalism--and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has
genius enough to discern and reproduce it--lies among the middle and
lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an
especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the
mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical lady novelists show us the
operation of their religious views among people (there really are many
such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a brass-bound
gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in
whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be strictly
consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the
industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures of
religious life among the negroes? Instead of this pious ladies nauseate
us with novels which remind us of what we sometimes see in a worldly
woman recently "converted;"--she is as fond of a fine dinner-table as
before, but she invites clergymen instead of beaux; she thinks as much of
her dress as before, but she adopts a more sober choice of colors and
patterns; her conversation is as trivial as before, but the triviality is
flavored with gospel instead of gossip. In "The Old Grey Church" we have
the same sort of Evangelical travesty of the fashionable novel, and of
course the vicious, intriguing baronet is not wanting. It is worth while
to give a sample of the style of conversation attributed to this
high-born rake--a style that, in its profuse italics and pa