this standard, we must admit that Miss Ingelow's prose, though
possessing many merits, has not quite the charm of her verses. With a
good deal of skill in depicting character, and with a style that is not
unpleasing, though rather formal and old-fashioned, she has no serious
drawback except a very prominent and unpleasant moral tendency, which
is, indeed, made so conspicuous that one rather resents it, and feels a
slight reaction in favor of vice. One is disposed to apply to so
oppressively didactic an author the cautious criticism of Talleyrand on
his female friend,--"She is insufferable, but that is her only fault."
For this demonstrativeness of ethics renders it necessary for her to
paint her typical sinners in colors of total blackness, and one seldom
finds, even among mature offenders, such unmitigated scoundrels as she
exhibits in their teens. They do not move or talk like human beings, but
like lay figures into which certain specified sins have been poured.
This is an artistic as well as ethical error. As Porson finely said to
Rogers, "In drawing a villain, we should always furnish him with
something that may seem to justify him to himself"; and Schiller, in his
aesthetic writings, lays down the same rule. Yet this censurable habit
does not seem to proceed from anything cynical in the author's own
nature, but rather from inexperience, and from a personal directness
which moves only in straight lines. It seems as if she were so
single-minded in her good intents as to assume all bad people equally
single-minded in evil; but they are not.

Thus, in "The Cumberers," the fault to be assailed is selfishness, and,
in honest zeal to show it in its most formidable light, she builds up
her typical "Cumberer" into such a complicated monster, so stupendous in
her self-absorption, as to be infinitely less beneficial to the reader
than a merely ordinary inconsistent human being would have been. The
most selfish younger sister reading this story would become a Pharisee,
and thank God, that, whatever her peccadilloes, she was not so bad as
this Amelia. "My Great-Aunt's Picture" does the same for the vice of
envy; "Dr. Deane's Governess" for discontent, and so on; only that this
last story is so oddly mixed up with English class-distinctions and
conventionalisms that one hardly knows when the young lady is supposed
to be doing right and when doing wrong. The same puzzle occurs in the
closing story, "Emily's Ambition," where the ce