his companion. Our various fashionable manias, for
charity one season, for science the next, are only so many clever
contrivances for keeping our neighbour at arm's length. We can attend
committees, and canvass for subscribers, and archaeologise, and
geologise, and take ether with our fellow Christians for a twelvemonth,
as we might sit cross-legged and smoke the pipe of fraternity with a
Turk for the same period--and know at the end of the time as little of
the real feelings of the one as we should about the domestic relations
of the other. But there are ways and means for lifting the veil which
equally favour our national idiosyncrasy; and a new and remarkable novel
is one of them--especially the nearer it comes to real life. We invite
our neighbour to a walk with the deliberate and malicious object of
getting thoroughly acquainted with him. We ask no impertinent questions--
we proffer no indiscreet confidences--we do not even sound him, ever so
delicately, as to his opinion of a common friend, for he would be sure
not to say, lest we should go and tell; but we simply discuss Becky
Sharp, or Jane Eyre, and our object is answered at once.

There is something about these two new and noticeable characters which
especially compels everybody to speak out. They are not to be dismissed
with a few commonplace moralities and sentimentalities. They do not fit
any ready-made criticism. They give the most stupid something to think
of, and the most reserved something to say; the most charitable too are
betrayed into home comparisons which they usually condemn, and the most
ingenious stumble into paradoxes which they can hardly defend. Becky and
Jane also stand well side by side both in their analogies and their
contrasts. Both the ladies are governesses, and both make the same move
in society; the one, in Jane Eyre phraseology, marrying her "master,"
and the other her master's son. Neither starts in life with more than a
moderate capital of good looks--Jane Eyre with hardly that--for it is
the fashion now-a-days with novelists to give no encouragement to the
insolence of mere beauty, but rather to prove to all whom it may concern
how little a sensible woman requires to get on with in the world. Both
have also an elfish kind of nature, with which they divine the secrets
of other hearts, and conceal those of their own; and both rejoice in
that peculiarity of feature which Mademoiselle de Luzy has not
contributed to render popular, v