Madonna touches. But the painter does not dare to
do it. Indeed, he has painted so long after the other fashion that
he would hate the canvas before him, were he to give way to the
rouge-begotten roughness or to the flesh-pots,--or even to the winds.
And how, my lord, would you, who are giving hundreds, more than
hundreds, for this portrait of your dear one, like to see it in print
from the art critic of the day, that she is a brazen-faced hoyden who
seems to have had a glass of wine too much, or to have been making
hay?

And so also has the reading world taught itself to like best the
characters of all but divine men and women. Let the man who paints
with pen and ink give the gas-light, and the flesh-pots, the passions
and pains, the prurient prudence and the rouge-pots and pounce-boxes
of the world as it is, and he will be told that no one can care a
straw for his creations. With whom are we to sympathise? says the
reader, who not unnaturally imagines that a hero should be heroic.
Oh, thou, my reader, whose sympathies are in truth the great and only
aim of my work, when you have called the dearest of your friends
round you to your hospitable table, how many heroes are there sitting
at the board? Your bosom friend,--even if he be a knight without
fear, is he a knight without reproach? The Ivanhoe that you know, did
he not press Rebecca's hand? Your Lord Evandale,--did he not bring
his coronet into play when he strove to win his Edith Bellenden?
Was your Tresilian still true and still forbearing when truth and
forbearance could avail him nothing? And those sweet girls whom you
know, do they never doubt between the poor man they think they love,
and the rich man whose riches they know they covet?

Go into the market, either to buy or sell, and name the thing you
desire to part with or to get, as it is, and the market is closed
against you. Middling oats are the sweepings of the granaries. A
useful horse is a jade gone at every point. Good sound port is sloe
juice. No assurance short of A 1 betokens even a pretence to merit.
And yet in real life we are content with oats that are really
middling, are very glad to have a useful horse, and know that if we
drink port at all we must drink some that is neither good nor sound.
In those delineations of life and character which we call novels a
similarly superlative vein is desired. Our own friends around us are
not always merry and wise, nor, alas! always honest and true. They