oments for this skill.' There are, it will not surprise you, some
honourable women and a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of 'the
withered world of Thackerayan satire;' who think your eyes were ever
turned to the sordid aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens
to 'take away her silver bread-basket;' to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of
this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with life,
not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon because there
are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not impaled certain noxious
human insects, you would have better pleased Mr. Ruskin; had you
confined yourself to such performances, you would have been more dear to
the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.

You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a doll,
but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either of Lady
Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can pardon you
Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to forgive you Emmy
Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not know in his heart that
the best women--God bless them--lean, in their characters, either to the
sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous affections
of Helen? 'Tis Heaven, not you, that made them so; and they are easily
pardoned, both for being a very little lower than the angels and for
their gentle ambition to be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings
and harps and haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own
faces in the glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and
Consuelo. Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot,
designed Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in
the portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?

That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a snarling
cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a good woman:
these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to you, who were once
so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend against. A French
critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do preach too much. Did any
author but yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong
thread) of his plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale,
we also might be offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who
that likes the wise trifling of the one and