d introduces the reader to better company and more elevated thoughts
than the novels of the time usually afford. "The Man of Feeling" is
hardly a narrative. Harley, the chief character, is a sensitive,
retiring man, with feelings too fine for his surroundings. The author
places him in various scenes, and traces the effect which each produces
upon his character. The effect of the work is agreeable, though
melancholy, and the early death of Harley completes the delineation of
a man too gentle and too sensitive to battle with life.

In his next novel Mackenzie described the counterpart of Harley, "The
Man of the World." Almost any writer of the present day who took a man
of the world for his hero, would draw him as a calm, philosophical
person, neither very good nor very bad,--one who took the pleasures and
troubles of life as they came, without quarrelling with either. But the
man of the world as Mackenzie paints him, and as the eighteenth century
made him, was quite another individual. Sir Thomas Sindall is a villain
of the heroic type. Not one, simply, who does all the injury and
commits all the crimes which chance brings in his way. He labors with a
ceaseless persistency, and a resolution which years do not diminish, to
seduce a single woman. Without any apparent passion, he finally
accomplishes his object by force, after having spent several years in
ruining her brother to prevent his interference. The long periods of
time, the great expenditure of vital energy, and the exhaustless fund
of brutality which are consumed by the fictitious villains of the
eighteenth century in gratifying what would seem merely a passing
inclination, astonish the reader of to-day. The crime of rape, rarely
now introduced into fiction, and rarely figuring even in criminal
courts, is a common incident in old novels, and as commonly, remains
unpunished. In Sir Thomas Sindall, Mackenzie meant to present a
contrast to the delicate and benevolent character of Harley. Both are
extremes, the one of sensibility, the other of brutality. Harley was a
new creation, but Sindall quite a familiar person, with whom all
readers of the novels of the last century have often associated.

It was suggested very sensibly to Mackenzie, that the interest of most
works of fiction depended on the _designing_ villainy of one or more
characters, and that in actual life calamities were more often brought
about by the innocent errors of the sufferers. To place this view