mood,
may indulge in some fine writing regarding the holy beauteousness of
maternal affection.

Why not? If authors sneer, it is the critic's business to sneer at them
for sneering. He must pretend to be their superior, or who would care
about his opinion? And his livelihood is to find fault. Besides, he is
right sometimes; and the stories he reads, and the characters drawn
in them, are old, sure enough. What stories are new? All types of all
characters march through all fables: tremblers and boasters; victims and
bullies; dupes and knaves; long-eared Neddies, giving themselves leonine
airs; Tartuffes wearing virtuous clothing; lovers and their trials,
their blindness, their folly and constancy. With the very first page of
the human story do not love and lies too begin? So the tales were told
ages before Aesop; and asses under lions' manes roared in Hebrew; and
sly foxes flattered in Etruscan; and wolves in sheep's clothing gnashed
their teeth in Sanskrit, no doubt. The sun shines to-day as he did when
he first began shining; and the birds in the tree overhead, while I am
writing, sing very much the same note they have sung ever since there
were finches. Nay, since last he besought good-natured friends to listen
once a month to his talking, a friend of the writer has seen the New
World, and found the (featherless) birds there exceedingly like their
brethren of Europe. There may be nothing new under and including the
sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil,
hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and
quiet. And then will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da
capo.

This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will
wear peacocks' feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks;
in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves, the
splendour of their plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks,
and the magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the
absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert
squeaking; in which lions in love will have their claws pared by sly
virgins; in which rogues will sometimes triumph, and honest folks, let
us hope, come by their own; in which there will be black crape and white
favours; in which there will be tears under orange-flower wreaths, and
jokes in mourning-coaches; in which there will be dinners of herbs with
contentment and wit