ot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel their
reality. But he does make us feel this in most cases, the important
cases, and in the other cases his power of interesting us is so great
that we do not stop to examine the grounds of our sensation, or to
question the validity of our emotions. The action, which is
positively of to-day, or yesterday at the furthest, passes in Boston
and England, among people of such great fortune and high rank and
transcendent fashion that the proudest reader cannot complain of their
social quality. As to their moral quality, one might have thought the
less said the better, if the author had not said so much that is
pertinent and impressive. It is from first to last a book with a
conscience in it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience. It is
so very nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is
with a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of surprise
at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not shortcomings that
impair its supreme effect. This, I take it, is the intimation of a
mystical authority in marriage against which divorce sins in vain,
which no recreancy can subvert, and by virtue of which it claims
eternally its own the lovers united in it; though they seem to become
haters, it cannot release them to happiness in a new union through any
human law.

If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly dramatic)
no more than this, he would have established his right to be taken
seriously, but he has done very much more, and has made us acquainted
with types and characters which we do not readily forget, and with
characters much more real than their ambient. For instance, the Old
Cambridge in which the Vassalls live is not the Old Cambridge of fact,
but the Vassalls are the Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls
in which they dwell are of a baroniality difficult of verification.
Their honor, their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though
their social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary
experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its
difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely
suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in which
it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the heroine, is
derivatively of the older Boston which has passed away, and actually of
the newer Boston which will not be so much regretted when it passes,
the fast