o _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 trop_, 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 age--as mischievous as his extravagances
will let him be'; speaks of K