ake the reviewer's business entirely off
our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one
leading periodical. But of all critics an English matron ought to be
the best--open as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and
admiring sympathies, accustomed by her Protestant education to
unsullied purity of thought, and inheriting from her race, not only
freedom of mind and reverence for antiquity, but the far higher
birthright of English honesty.

And such a genial and honest spirit, we think, runs through this
book.

Another difficult task, perhaps the most difficult of all, the
authoress has well performed. We mean the handling of stories whose
facts she partly or wholly disbelieves, while she admires and loves
their spirit and moral; or doctrines, to pronounce on whose truth or
falsehood is beyond her subject. This difficulty Mr. Newman, in the
"Lives of the English Saints," edited and partly written by him,
turned with wonderful astuteness to the advantage of Romanism; but
others, more honest, have not been so victorious. Witness the
painfully uncertain impression left by some parts of one or two of
those masterly articles on Romish heroes which appeared in the
"Quarterly Review;" an uncertainty which we have the fullest reason
to believe was most foreign to the reviewer's mind and conscience.
Even Mr. Macaulay's brilliant history here and there falls into the
same snare. No one but those who have tried it can be aware of the
extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic historian from
degenerating into an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or
understand the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like the
present, becomes frantically reckless, under the certainty that, say
what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the Protestants, an
Infidel by the Papists, a Pantheist by the Ultra-High-Church, and a
Rogue by all three.

Now, we certainly shall not say that Mrs. Jameson is greater than the
writers just mentioned; but we must say, that female tact and deep
devotional feeling cut the Gordian knot which has puzzled more
cunning heads. Not that Mrs. Jameson is faultless; we want something
yet, in the telling of a Christian fairy-tale, and know not what we
want: but never were legends narrated with more discernment and
simplicity than these.

As an instance, take the legend of St. Dorothea (vol. ii. p. 184),
which is especially one of those stories of "sainted personages who,"