dies like Emma, and Elizabeth,
and Catherine: women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for
the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and the
parish's concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with
vain yearnings and interesting doubts. Who can engage his fancy with
their match-makings and the conduct of their affections, when so many
daring and dazzling heroines approach and solicit his regard?

Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden
fleurs-de-lys--ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count
their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and even their
husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical importance. With
these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant Italian musicians, maids
whose souls are unsoiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, and
whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Daedalus
and Scopas, is the more admirable, because entirely derived from loving
study of the inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man
round the corner. When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes,
where are your Emmas and Elizabeths? Your volumes neither excite nor
satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific fiction,
which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States, as well as in
France and at home.

You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open. Knowing Lydia
and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost
insignificant characters? With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone
far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to
the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even now, in the
circulating library. How Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first
beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he climbed up by a ladder to
her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung on gates together, met at odd
seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped: all this might have been
put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would
not have been less popular than several favourites of our time. Had you
cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly
over the thickness of Mary's legs and the softness of Kitty's cheeks,
and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham's whiskers, you would have left a
romance still dear to young ladies.

Or again, you might entrance your students still