ell. I
hear it much admired--and blamed. It is one of the many proofs of the
desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser
insoluble moral problems. George Sand has turned their heads in that
direction. I think a few _broad_ scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding
were very harmless in comparison. They _confounded_ nothing. . . .

The Heir of Redcliffe I have not read. . . . I am not worthy of
superhuman flights of virtue--in a novel. I want to see how people
act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself. Then I
have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists
want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is:
Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without their help.

The Head of the Family has some merits . . . But there is too much
affliction and misery and frenzy. The heroine is one of those
creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied
to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be 'shyed' at
(i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of
all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the
worse for all the blows it has had--nay, the better--and that now,
with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going
to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is not
so--_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out
of such wrecks.

In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she
detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as
moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M.
Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone.
'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short,
governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says
that the state of things in France fills 'me with the deepest anxiety on
one point,--the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our
salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead
of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear
Charles Buller--_our_ turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must
really look to this.' The belief in the power of the Universities to
stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as
'one of the dissolvents of the a