characters”? May we not forgive their general incorrectness for the sake of their literary and artistic value? Shall Charles Lamb’s testimony count for nothing, when we remember his comfortable allusion to “kind, light-hearted Wainwright”? And what shall we think of Edward Fitzgerald, the gentlest and least hurtful of Englishmen, abandoning himself, in the clear and genial weather, to the delights of Tacitus, “full of pleasant atrocity”? Repentant villains, I must confess, are not greatly to my mind. They sacrifice their artistic to their ethical value, and must be handled with consummate skill to escape a suspicious flavor of Sunday-school romance. The hardened criminal, disarmed and converted by the innocent attractions of childhood, is a favorite device of poets and story-writers who cater to the sentiments of maternity; but it is wiser to lay no stress upon the permanency of such conversions. That swift and sudden yielding to a gentle emotion or a noble aspiration, which is one of the undying traits of humanity, attracts us often by the very force of its evanescence, by the limitations which prove its truth. But the slow, stern process of regeneration is not an emotional matter, and cannot be convincingly portrayed with a few facile touches in the last chapter of a novel. Thackeray knew better than this, when he showed us Becky Sharp touched and softened by her good little sister-in-law; heartsick now and then of her own troublesome schemes, yet sinking inevitably lower and lower through the weight of overmastering instincts and desires. She can aspire intermittingly to a cleaner life, but she can never hope to reach it. The simple literature of the past is curiously rich in these pathetic transient glimpses into fallen nature’s brighter side. Where can we see depicted with more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting of man’s brutality, after it has wrought the ruin it devised, than in the fine old ballad of _Edom O’Gordon_? The young daughter of the house of Rodes is lowered from the walls of the burning castle, and the cruel Gordon spears transfix her as she falls. She lies dead, in her budding girlhood, at the feet of her father’s foe, and his heart is strangely stirred and troubled when he looks at her childish face. “O bonnie, bonnie was hir mouth, And cherry were hir cheiks, And clear, clear was hir yellow hair, Whereon the reid bluid dreips. “Then wi’ his spear he turned hir owre, O gin hir face was wan! He sayd, ‘You are the first that eir I wisht alive again.’ “He turned hir owre and owre again, O gin hir skin was whyte! ‘I might hae spared that bonnie face To hae been sum man’s delyte.’”