say
to herself, "Poor persecuted _dove_ that I am," and adore a labourer's
shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging
her jest for earnest. Margaritta--following her romance-models--falls a
victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet--at
whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence
as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent of
romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as
unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is
an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth
century itself, of virtuous curates, _un_virtuous "tonish" rectors, who
calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for
obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine
ladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds. The preface and the
opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which
are by no means fulfilled. It is "S.G." who asserts that _Ida of Athens_
"has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat the
suggested substitution.

The only faults that can be found with _The Heroine_ or _The Adventures
of Cherubina_, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same
year, with no very different object and subject, though written in
lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.
Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a
burlesque rather overdone--a burlesque _burlesque_--not in the manner of
Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers--is
unfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive--one can even enjoy--the
ghost who not only sneezes but says, "D--n, all is blown!" When the
heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more
doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully to
the bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the real
Mackay" as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling
the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not
amuse _us_ much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the
early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.
But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the
infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of _Northanger
Abbey_ had been launched by the pen, if not the pre