publishes their contagious guilt deserves some share of their odium. The novels of Henry Mackenzie have a charm of their own, which may be largely attributed to the fact that their author was a gentleman. Whoever has read, to any extent, the works of fiction of the eighteenth century, must have observed how perpetually he was kept in low company, how rarely he met with a character who had the instincts as well as the social position of a gentleman. A tone of refined sentiment and dignity pervades "The Man of Feeling," which recalls the "Vicar of Wakefield," and introduces the reader to better company and more elevated thoughts than the novels of the time usually afford. "The Man of Feeling" is hardly a narrative. Harley, the chief character, is a sensitive, retiring man, with feelings too fine for his surroundings. The author places him in various scenes, and traces the effect which each produces upon his character. The effect of the work is agreeable, though melancholy, and the early death of Harley completes the delineation of a man too gentle and too sensitive to battle with life. In his next novel Mackenzie described the counterpart of Harley, "The Man of the World." Almost any writer of the present day who took a man of the world for his hero, would draw him as a calm, philosophical person, neither very good nor very bad,--one who took the pleasures and troubles of life as they came, without quarrelling with either. But the man of the world as Mackenzie paints him, and as the eighteenth century made him, was quite another individual. Sir Thomas Sindall is a villain of the heroic type. Not one, simply, who does all the injury and commits all the crimes which chance brings in his way. He labors with a ceaseless persistency, and a resolution which years do not diminish, to seduce a single woman. Without any apparent passion, he finally accomplishes his object by force, after having spent several years in ruining her brother to prevent his interference. The long periods of time, the great expenditure of vital energy, and the exhaustless fund of brutality which are consumed by the fictitious villains of the eighteenth century in gratifying what would seem merely a passing inclination, astonish the reader of to-day. The crime of rape, rarely now introduced into fiction, and rarely figuring even in criminal courts, is a common incident in old novels, and as commonly, remains unpunished. In Sir Thomas Sindall, Mackenzie meant to present a contrast to the delicate and benevolent character of Harley. Both are extremes, the one of sensibility, the other of brutality. Harley was a new creation, but Sindall quite a familiar person, with whom all readers of the novels of the last century have often associated.