oic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not
the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and
unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that
complaint favourably many years ago. 'An utterly uninteresting
character!' I think I hear a lady reader exclaim--Mrs. Farthingale, for
example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine
tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some
personage who is quite a 'character'.

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your
fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty
out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last
census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor
extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with
sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably
had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are
certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not
manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are
simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more
or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of
them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the
painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys;
their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they
have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in
their very insignificance--in our comparison of their dim and narrow
existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they
share?

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to
see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying
in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes,
and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that case, I
should have no fear of your not caring to know what farther befell the
Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell
at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline
to pursue my story farther; and you will easily find reading more to your
taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels,
full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing,
have appeared only within the last sea