and delicate
hands giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by a
distinct _tres vrai_, emphasized by many notes of exclamation. The
colloquial style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious
inversion, and a careful avoidance of such cheap phraseology as can be
heard every day. Angry young gentlemen exclaim, "'Tis ever thus,
methinks;" and in the half hour before dinner a young lady informs her
next neighbor that the first day she read Shakespeare she "stole away
into the park, and beneath the shadow of the greenwood tree, devoured
with rapture the inspired page of the great magician." But the most
remarkable efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in their
philosophic reflections. The authoress of "Laura Gay," for example,
having married her hero and heroine, improves the event by observing that
"if those sceptics, whose eyes have so long gazed on matter that they can
no longer see aught else in man, could once enter with heart and soul,
into such bliss as this, they would come to say that the soul of man and
the polypus are not of common origin, or of the same texture." Lady
novelists, it appears, can see something else besides matter; they are
not limited to phenomena, but can relieve their eyesight by occasional
glimpses of the _noumenon_, and are, therefore, naturally better able
than any one else to confound sceptics, even of that remarkable but to us
unknown school which maintains that the soul of man is of the same
texture as the polypus.

The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may
call the _oracular_ species--novels intended to expound the writer's
religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion
abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and
actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely
exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge
from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing
ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible
qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and
speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such
difficulties is something like this: Take a woman's head, stuff it with a
smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false
notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every
day, and serve up hot in feeble Engl