are often cross and foolish, and sometimes treacherous and false.
They are so, and we are angry. Then we forgive them, not without a
consciousness of imperfection on our own part. And we know--or, at
least, believe,--that though they be sometimes treacherous and false,
there is a balance of good. We cannot have heroes to dine with us.
There are none. And were these heroes to be had, we should not like
them. But neither are our friends villains,--whose every aspiration
is for evil, and whose every moment is a struggle for some
achievement worthy of the devil.

The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so
bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because
they are so good. To make them and ourselves somewhat better,--not by
one spring heavenwards to perfection, because we cannot so use our
legs,--but by slow climbing, is, we may presume, the object of all
teachers, leaders, legislators, spiritual pastors, and masters. He
who writes tales such as this, probably also has, very humbly, some
such object distantly before him. A picture of surpassing godlike
nobleness,--a picture of a King Arthur among men, may perhaps do
much. But such pictures cannot do all. When such a picture is
painted, as intending to show what a man should be, it is true. If
painted to show what men are, it is false. The true picture of life
as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they
are, and how they might rise, not, indeed, to perfection, but one
step first, and then another, on the ladder.

Our hero, Frank Greystock, falling lamentably short in his heroism,
was not in a happy state of mind when he reached Bobsborough. It
may be that he returned to his own borough and to his mother's arms
because he felt, that were he to determine to be false to Lucy, he
would there receive sympathy in his treachery. His mother would, at
any rate, think that it was well, and his father would acknowledge
that the fault committed was in the original engagement with poor
Lucy, and not in the treachery. He had written that letter to her in
his chambers one night in a fit of ecstasy; and could it be right
that the ruin of a whole life should be the consequence?

It can hardly be too strongly asserted that Lizzie Greystock did not
appear to Frank as she has been made to appear to the reader. In all
this affair of the necklace he was beginning to believe that she
was really an ill-used woman; and as to