good character the most interesting. Of late days,
especially since it has been the fashion to write moral and
even religious novels, one might almost say of some of the
wise good heroines, what a lively girl once said to [me] of
her well-meaning aunt--'Upon my word she is enough to make
anybody wicked.' And though beauty and talents are heaped on
the right side, the writer, in spite of himself, is sure to
put agreeableness on the wrong; the person from whose errors
he means you should take warning, runs away with your secret
partiality in the mean time. Had this very story been
conducted by a common hand, Effie would have attracted all
our concern and sympathy--Jeanie only cold approbation.
Whereas Jeanie, without youth, beauty, genius, warm
passions, or any other novel-perfection, is here our object
from beginning to end. This is 'inlisting the affections in
the cause of virtue' ten times more than ever Richardson
did; for whose male and female pedants, all-excelling as
they are, I never could care half so much as I found myself
inclined to do for Jeanie before I finished the first
volume....

"You know I tell you my opinion just as I should do to a
third person, and I trust the freedom is not unwelcome. I
was a little tired of your Edinburgh lawyers in the
introduction; English people in general will be more so, as
well as impatient of the passages alluding to Scotch law
throughout. Mr. Saddletree will not entertain them. The
latter part of the fourth volume unavoidably flags to a
certain degree; after Jeanie is happily settled at
Roseneath, we have no more to wish for. But the chief fault
I have to find relates to the reappearance and shocking fate
of the boy. I hear on all sides, 'Oh, I do not like that!' I
cannot say what I would have had instead; but I do not like
it either; it is a lame, huddled conclusion. I know you so
well in it, by the bye!--you grow tired yourself, want to
get rid of the story, and hardly care how. Sir George
Staunton finishes his career very fitly; he ought not to die
in his bed, and for Jeanie's sake one would not have him
hanged. {p.268} It is unnatural, though, that he should
ever have gone within twenty miles of the Tolbooth, or shown
his face in the streets of Edinburgh, or dined at a