novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy
fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described
exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while
the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by
harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the
faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled
into senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock.

17. V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast or
card-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest,
and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other as
children--meet, as they grow up in testing labor; and if a stout
farmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in the
patrician families of the field, the young people know what they are
doing, and marry a neighboring estate, or a covetable title, with some
conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these,
their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and
fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an
entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preached to
them in the doctrines of unbridled pleasure which are merely an apology
for their peculiar forms of ill-breeding. It is quite curious how often
the catastrophe, or the leading interest, of a modern novel, turns upon
the want, both in maid and bachelor, of the common self-command which
was taught to their grandmothers and grandfathers as the first element
of ordinarily decent behavior. Rashly inquiring the other day the plot
of a modern story[43] from a female friend, I elicited, after some
hesitation, that it hinged mainly on the young people's "forgetting
themselves in a boat;" and I perceive it to be accepted as nearly an
axiom in the code of modern civic chivalry that the strength of amiable
sentiment is proved by our incapacity on proper occasions to express,
and on improper ones to control it. The pride of a gentleman of the old
school used to be in his power of saying what he meant, and being silent
when he ought (not to speak of the higher nobleness which bestowed love
where it was honorable, and reverence where it was due); but the
automatic amours and involuntary proposals of recent romance acknowledge
little further law of morality than the instinct of an insect, or the
effervescence of a chemical mixture