outhey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh
should also have read them and praised them may, as I have said, prove
as much for the personal charm of the writer, and her warm sunshine of
pleasant companionship, as for the books themselves. They seem to have
run through many editions, and to have received no little encouragement.
Morality and sensation alternate in her pages. Monsters abound there.
They hire young men to act base parts, to hold villainous conversations
which the husbands are intended to overhear. They plot and scheme to
ruin the fair fame and domestic happiness of the charming heroines, but
they are justly punished, and their plots are defeated. One villain, on
his way to an appointment with a married woman, receives so severe a
blow upon the head from her brother, that he dies in agonies of fruitless
remorse. Another, who incautiously boasts aloud his deep-laid scheme
against Constantia's reputation in the dark recesses of a stage-coach,
is unexpectedly seized by the arm. A stranger in the corner, whom he had
not noticed, was no other than the baronet whom Constantia has loved all
along. The dawn breaks in brightly, shining on the stranger's face:
baffled, disgraced, the wicked schemer leaves the coach at the very next
stage, and Constantia's happiness is ensured by a brilliant marriage
with the man she loves. 'Lucy is the dark sky,' cries another lovely
heroine, 'but you, my lord, and my smiling children, these are the
rainbow that illumines it; and who would look at the gloom that see the
many tinted Iris? not I, indeed.' 'Valentine's Eve,' from which this is
quoted, was published after John Opie's death. So was a novel called
'Temper,' and the 'Tales of Real Life.' Mrs. Opie, however, gave up
writing novels when she joined the Society of Friends.

For some years past, Mrs. Opie had been thrown more and more in the
company of a very noble and remarkable race of men and women living
quietly in their beautiful homes in the neighbourhood of Norwich, but
of an influence daily growing--handsome people, prosperous, generous,
with a sort of natural Priesthood belonging to them. Scorning to live
for themselves alone, the Gurneys were the dispensers and originators of
a hundred useful and benevolent enterprises in Norwich and elsewhere.
They were Quakers, and merchants, and bankers. How much of their strength
lay in their wealth and prosperity, how much in their enthusiasm, their
high spirits, voluntarily curbed, their