le, as would have best suited her subject, is disfigured by
the euphuism which was the fashion among writers of the last century.
When she is enthusiastic, her pen "darts rapidly along" and her "heart
bounds;" if she grows indignant at Rousseau's ideal of feminine
perfection, "the rigid frown of insulted virtue effaces the smile of
complacency which his eloquent periods are wont to raise, when I read his
voluptuous reveries." When she wants to prove that men of genius, as a
rule, have good constitutions, she says:--

"... Considering the thoughtless manner in which they lavished
their strength when, investigating a favorite science, they have
wasted the lamp of life, forgetful of the midnight hour, or when,
lost in poetic dreams, fancy has peopled the scene, and the soul
has been disturbed, till it shook the constitution by the passions
that meditation had raised, whose objects, the baseless fabric of a
vision, faded before the exhausted eye, they must have had iron
frames."

In her praise of the virtue of modesty, she exclaims:

"... It is the pale moon-beam that renders more interesting every
virtue it softens, giving mild grandeur to the contracted horizon.
Nothing can be more beautiful than the poetical fiction which makes
Diana, with her silver crescent, the goddess of chastity. I have
sometimes thought that, wandering in sedate step in some lonely
recess, a modest dame of antiquity must have felt a glow of
conscious dignity, when, after contemplating the soft, shadowy
landscape, she has invited with placid fervor the mild reflection
of her sister's beams to turn to her chaste bosom."

She is too ready to moralize, and her moralizing degenerates
unfortunately often into commonplace platitudes. She is even at times
disagreeably pompous and authoritative, and preaches rather than argues.
This was due partly to a then prevailing tendency in literature. Every
writer--essayist, poet, and novelist--preached in those days. Mary
frequently forgets she has a cause to prove in her desire to teach a
lesson. She exhorts her sisters as a minister might appeal to his
brethren, and this resemblance is made still more striking by the
oratorical flights or prayers with which she interrupts her argument to
address her Creator. Moreover, the book is throughout, as Leslie Stephen
says, "rhetorical rather than speculative." It is unmistakably the
c