the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of
all these--a composite order of feminine fatuity--that produces the
largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the
_mind-and-millinery_ species. The heroine is usually an heiress,
probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an
amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in
the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle
distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her
eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike
free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb _contralto_ and
a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly
religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original
tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress--that rank and
wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly
gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and
securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of
crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in
impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her
reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of
rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches,
and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her
recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded
conversations amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of
insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of
philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men
have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men
play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then
by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the
working-day business of the world is somehow being carried on, but
ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany
the heroine on her "starring" expedition through life. They see her at a
ball, and they are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on
a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at
church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanor. She is
the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all