hich she cannot naturally experience. The business-like
manner in which she makes her preparations for death have nothing
sentimental about them, nothing that even faintly suggests the pretty
death-beds with which Mr. Dickens and others have made us familiar; but I
doubt if the most practical money-maker in Wall Street could read it
without feeling uncomfortable.

How, after describing such a character as Clarissa, Richardson could turn
to the whale-bone figures in "Sir Charles Grandison" is quite
incomprehensible. Had he been ruined by his numerous female admirers and
correspondents, or by his desire to become fashionable, or, as is most
likely, by the wish to create in Sir Charles a virtuous foil to him whom
he thought the wicked, witty, delightful, and detestable Lovelace?
Whatever the reason, it is a thousand pities that he gave way to his
impulse.

It would interest you as well as me to note little points of manners that
are to be gathered from the three books. I have not time to write much
more, but will tell you two or three that have struck me. If you read
them, as I still hope you may, you will see what early risers they all
are, even the wicked Mr. B.; while Clarissa, when in Dover Street,
usually gives Lovelace his interviews at six in the morning. One hears
of two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage. How much more wonderful is love
that rises at six!

Richardson was a woman's novelist, as Fielding was a man's. I sometimes
think of Dr. Johnson's _mot_: "Claret for boys, port for men, and,"
smiling, "brandy for heroes." So one might fancy him saying: "Richardson
for women, Fielding for men, Smollett for ruffians," though some of _his_
rough customers were heroes, too. But we now confine ourselves so
closely to "the later writers" of Russia, France, England, America, that
the woman who reads Richardson may be called heroic. "To the unknown
heroine" I dedicate my respect, as the Athenians dedicated an altar to
"the unknown hero." Will you be the heroine? I am afraid you won't!

GERARD DE NERVAL

_To Miss Girton, Cambridge_.

Dear Miss Girton,--Yes, I fancy Gerard de Nerval is one of that rather
select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow you to read.
But even if you read him, I do not think you will care very much for him.
He is a man's author, not a woman's; and yet one can hardly say why. It
is not that he offends "the delicacy of your sex," as Tom Jones calls it;
I think