Of all departments of literature, fiction is the one to which, by nature and by circumstance, women are best adapted. Exceptional women will of course be found competent to the highest success in other departments; but speaking generally, novels are their forte. The domestic experiences which form the bulk of woman's knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of sentiment which we have already attributed to the feminine mind. Love is the staple of fiction, for it "forms the story of a woman's life." The joys and sorrows of affection, the incidents of domestic life, the aspirations and fluctuations of emotional life, assume typical forms in the novel. Hence we may be prepared to find women succeeding better in _finesse_ of detail, in pathos and sentiment, while men generally succeed better in the construction of plots and the delineation of character. Such a novel as _Tom Jones_ or _Vanity Fair_ we shall not get from a woman, nor such an effort of imaginative history as _Ivanhoe_ or _Old Mortality_; but Fielding, Thackeray and Scott are equally excluded from such perfection in its kind as _Pride and Prejudice_, _Indiana_ or _Jane Eyre_. As an artist Jane Austen surpasses all the male novelists that ever lived; and for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand. We are here led to another curious point in our subject, viz., the influence of sorrow upon female literature. It may be said without exaggeration that almost all literature has some remote connection with suffering. "Speculation," said Novalis, "is disease." It certainly springs from a vague disquiet. Poetry is analogous to the pearl which the oyster secretes in its malady. "Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song."