There are some works so simple in their structure, and so highly popular, that on both grounds they defy criticism. Their faults lie so open and undisguised, that the critic who would pertinaciously insist upon them, would get neither credit nor thanks for his pains. In this category is _The Vicar of Wakefield_. To expose its improbabilities of plot or character would be an easy and most ungracious task. We love the good Vicar, and he shall be allowed to tell his tale to the end of time just as he pleases. To be sure, this odd notion he entertains, that a clergyman ought by all means to marry once, and by no means more than once, is very like a monomania. He is so staunch a _monogamist_, as he calls it, as to be resolved on convincing his old friend and fellow-clergyman, Mr Wilmot, who has been married three times. But this, and all the wonderful things which the Thornhills, nephew and uncle, contrive to do, who cares to cavil at? The genuine feelings of human nature are portrayed in the novel,—kind, homely, unpretending feelings which all can sympathise with—and when the attention is once fixed by this species of truth, a thousand improbabilities may pass without challenge. It is always thus. The writer of fiction, whether it be fable or romance, and whether he deal with man or monster, or spirit of the air, has always found that if he can present a faithful reflexion of the human heart, he may give almost any conceivable license to the imagination. What most struck us on a late perusal of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, was the very low level, in point of refinement, on which all the female characters are placed. The love and the courtship are of the rudest sort, without the least trace of sentiment or the poetry of the passion. Mrs Primrose, notwithstanding the excellence of her gooseberry wine, and the liberality with which she dispenses it, is, we are sorry to say, decidedly a vulgar personage. That her learning and accomplishments were those which we should now assign to the housekeeper, rather than to the wife of a wealthy vicar, (for such is Dr Primrose when we are first introduced to him,) is no part of our objection; this the difference of times and systems of education may sufficiently explain. Mrs Primrose is vulgar _at the heart_. She lacks those feelings of refinement which sometimes grow up spontaneously even in the peasant’s hut.