hter, who
wishes to come, and hesitates for a quarter of an hour between doing so,
and going to a ball at which it has been for the last month her chief
ambition to be seen. She finally goes to the ball.

The story is, of course, one of which the violent contrasts and spectral
catastrophe could only take place, or be conceived, in a large city. A
village grocer cannot make a large fortune, cannot marry his daughters
to titled squires, and cannot die without having his children brought to
him, if in the neighborhood, by fear of village gossip, if for no better
cause.

6. II. But a much more profound feeling than this mere curiosity of
science in morbid phenomena is concerned in the production of the
carefulest forms of modern fiction. The disgrace and grief resulting
from the mere trampling pressure and electric friction of town life,
become to the sufferers peculiarly mysterious in their undeservedness,
and frightful in their inevitableness. The power of all surroundings
over them for evil; the incapacity of their own minds to refuse the
pollution, and of their own wills to oppose the weight, of the
staggering mass that chokes and crushes them into perdition, brings
every law of healthy existence into question with them, and every
alleged method of help and hope into doubt. Indignation, without any
calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative
self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into
sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze
beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops
itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the
regenerative vigor of manure, and the necessary obscurities of fimetic
Providence; showing how everybody's fault is somebody else's, how
infection has no law, digestion no will, and profitable dirt no
dishonor.

And thus an elaborate and ingenious scholasticism, in what may be called
the Divinity of Decomposition, has established itself in connection with
the more recent forms of romance, giving them at once a complacent tone
of clerical dignity, and an agreeable dash of heretical impudence; while
the inculcated doctrine has the double advantage of needing no laborious
scholarship for its foundation, and no painful self-denial for its
practice.

7. III. The monotony of life in the central streets of any great modern
city, but especially in those of London, where every emotion intended