elightful as a morning in May, but her satire is nearly always
labored. She is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its
follies and its weaknesses. Its joys, its bubbling humor and delight she
can appreciate, as well as all the pain and sorrow that come to men and
women; and she can fully enter into the life of her characters of every
kind, and portray their inmost motives and impulses; but the foibles of the
world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist. In her earlier books
she is said to have been under the influence of Thackeray, but her satire
is heavy, and lacks his light touch and his tender undertone of compassion.
Here is a good specimen of her earlier attempts to be satirical:

When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who
can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most
cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool,
he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may
await him out of doors. What a resource it is under fatigue and
irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied with small mats,
which would always be ready if you ever wanted to set anything on them!
And what styptic for a bleeding heart can equal copious squares of
crochet-work, which are useful for slipping down the moment you touch
them? [Footnote: Janet's Repentance, chapter III.]

Similar to this is the account of Mrs. Pullett's grief.

It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity
Introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization--the
sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow
of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with
several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate
ribbon-strings--what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened
child of civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is
checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an
interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and
eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too
devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves,
too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a
composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the
door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she