comfort to
think that, should such untoward persons make themselves disagreeable to
all else of human kind, there will be, nevertheless, to each, one
confiding loving creature, to put them in conceit with themselves, and
make them, notwithstanding their many perversities, believe that they
are unoffending male angels, and die in the bewildering fancy that they
are still loveable.

I have little more to say, but that, having been lately in a versifying
mood, I have set to rhyme your story of the cook and the lottery ticket;
and herein I have avoided that malicious propensity of our numerous
tellers of stories, whose only pleasure, as it appears to me, lies in
the plunging the heroes and heroines of their tales into inextricable
troubles and difficulties, and in continuing them in a state of
perplexity beyond the power of human sufferance; and who slur over their
unexpected, and generally ill-contrived escape, as a matter of small
importance; and with an envy of human happiness, like the fiend who sat
scowling on the bliss of Eden, either leave them with sinister
intentions, or absolutely drive them out of the Paradise which they have
so lately prepared for them.

I have lately been reading a very interesting, well conceived in many
respects, and pathetic novel, which, nevertheless, errs in this; and I
even think the pathos is injured by the last page, which is too painful
for _tenderness_, which appears the object of the able author. A
monumental effigy is but the mockery of all life's doings, which are
thus, with their sorrows and their joys, rendered nugatory; and all that
we have been reading, and are interested about, is unnecessarily
presented to us as dust and ashes. Such is the tale of Mount Sorrel.

Perhaps, too, I might say of this, and of other novels of the same kind,
that there is in them an unhealthy egotism; a Byronism of personal
feelings; an ingenious invention of labyrinth meandering into the mazes
of the mind and of the affections, in which there is always
bewilderment, and the escape is rather lucky than foreseen. Such was not
the mode adopted heretofore by more vigorous writers, who preferred
exhibiting the passions by action, and a few simple touches, which came
at once to the heart, without the necessity of unravelling the mismazes
of their course. If Achilles had made a long speech in Elysium about his
feelings, and attempted to describe them, when his question, if his son
excelled in glory, wa