"liquid" and "lustrous," always having been "large";
the nose, "naturally delicate," exhibits its "fine-cut lines"; the mouth
acquires an indescribable expression of loveliness; and the reader's
hoped-for Fright is transformed by Folly or Miss Pickering into a
commonplace, tiresome, _novelesque_ Beauty. Even Miss Bronte relented
toward Jane Eyre; and weaker novelists are continually repeating,
but with the omission of the moral, the story of the "Ugly Duck."
Unquestionably, there is the excuse to be made for this great error,
that it betrays the seeking after an Ideal. Dangerous word! The ideal
standard of excellence is, to be sure, fortunately changing, and the
unreal ideal will soon be confined to the second-rate writers for
second-rate readers. But all the great novelists of the two last
generations indulged themselves and their readers in these unrealities.
It is vastly easier to invent a consistent character than to represent
an inconsistent one;--a hero is easier to make (so all historians have
found) than a man.

Suppose, however, novelists could be placed in a society made up of
their favorite characters,--forced into real, lifelike intercourse with
them;--Richardson, for instance, with his Harriet Byron or Clarissa,
attended by Sir Charles; Miss Burney with Lord Orville and Evelina;
Miss Edgeworth with Caroline Percy, and that marvellous hero, Count
Altenburg; Scott with the automatons that he called Waverley and Flora
McIvor. Suppose they were brought together to share the comforts (cold
comforts they would be) of life, to pass days together, to meet every
morning at breakfast; with what a ludicrous sense of relief, at the
close of this purgatorial period, would not the unhappy novelists
have fled from these deserted heroes and heroines, and the precious
proprieties of their romance, to the very driest and mustiest of human
bores,--gratefully rejoicing that the world was not filled with such
creatures as they themselves had set before it as _ideals_!

To copy Nature faithfully and heartily is certainly not less needful
when stories are presented in words than when they are told on canvas or
in marble. In the "Scenes from Clerical Life" we have a happy example of
such copying. The three stories embraced under this title are written
vigorously, with a just appreciation of the romance of reality, and with
honest adherence to truth of representation in the sombre as well as the
brighter portions of life. It dema