wedding-day is its
catastrophe--or, in technical language, its _peripeteia_: whatever
else is important to her in succeeding years has its origin in that
event. So much for _that_ sex. For the other, it is admitted that Love
is not, in the same exclusive sense, the governing principle under
which their lives move: but what then are the concurrent forces, which
sometimes happen to cooeperate with that agency--but more frequently
disturb it? They are two; Ambition, and Avarice. Now for the vast
majority of men--Ambition, or the passion for personal distinction,
has too narrow a stage of action, its grounds of hope are too fugitive
and unsteady, to furnish any durable or domineering influence upon the
course of life. Avarice again is so repulsive to the native nobility
of the human heart, that it rarely obtains the dignity of a passion:
great energy of character is requisite to form a consistent and
accomplished miser: and of the mass of men it may be said--that, if
the beneficence of nature has in some measure raised them _above_
avarice by the necessity of those social instincts which she has
impressed upon their hearts, in some measure also they sink _below_ it
by their deficiencies in that austerity of self-denial and that savage
strength of will which are indispensable qualifications for the _role_
of heroic miser. A perfect miser in fact is a great man, and therefore
a very rare one. Take away then the two forces of Ambition and
Avarice,--what remains even to the male sex as a capital and
overruling influence in life, except the much nobler force of Love?
History confirms this view: the self-devotions and the voluntary
martyrdoms of all other passions collectively have been few by
comparison with those which have been offered at the altar of Love. If
society should ever make any great advance, and man as a species grow
conspicuously nobler, Love also will grow nobler; and a passion, which
at present is possible in any elevated form for one perhaps in a
hundred, will then be coextensive with the human heart.

[Footnote 68: This was published in _facsimile_ from the Original MS.
in _The Archivist and Autograph Review_, edited by S. Davey,
F.R.S.L.--June, 1888. [H.]]

On this view of the grandeur which belongs to the passion of Sexual
Love in the economy of life, as it is and as it may be, Novels have an
all-sufficient justification; and Novel-readers are obeying a higher
and more philosophic impulse than they are aw