situation is that we are not compelled to watch it from a jury-box. Now the disadvantage of being at once a novelist and a teacher is that you have no neutral ground from which to observe your characters, no friendly appreciation of things or people as you find them. What the artist accepts with delicate sympathy, though with no pretense at justification, the moralist must either justify or condemn. The first course is common enough, and produces a class of literature essentially vicious because of its very limitations,--six deadly sins held up to public execration, and the seventh presented to us tenderly as an ill-understood and sadly calumniated virtue. The second course--that of implied condemnation--is equally open to a Sunday-school story or to the least decorous of French novels; both have for their avowed object the pillorying of vice, and both put forward this claim as a reasonable excuse for existence. But art has no pillory, no stocks, no whipping-post, no exclusive methods for fixing our attention upon sin. Art gives us Lady Macbeth and Iago, and gives them to us without reproaches, without extenuation, and without any attempt to reform. It is less painful to watch the irresistible development of their respective crimes than to hear Thackeray lashing with keen scorn some poor sinner stumbling through the mazes of worldly wickedness, or to see George Eliot pursuing one of her own creations with inextinguishable severity and contempt. There is something paralyzing in the cold anger with which Rosamond Vincy is branded and shamed; there is something appalling in the conscientious vindictiveness with which Tito is hunted down, step by step, to his final retribution. That delightful essayist, Mr. Karl Hillebrand, whose artistic nature is about as much at home among modern theories as a strayed Faun in a button factory, has given us a half-humorous, half-despairing picture of some old acquaintances under the new dispensation: of Manon Lescaut threatened with Charlotte Brontë’s birch-rod; of Squire Western opening his startled eyes as Zola proceeds to detail for his benefit the latest and most highly realistic study of delirium tremens; of Falstaff, whom that losel Shakespeare treated so indulgently, listening abashed to George Eliot’s scathing denunciations. “For really, Sir John,” he hears her say, “you have no excuse whatever. If you were a poor devil who had never had any but bad examples before your eyes!--but you have had all the advantages which destiny can give to man on his way through life. Are you not born of a good family? Have you not had at Oxford the best education England is able to give to her children? Have you not had the highest connections? And, nevertheless, how low you have fallen! Do you know why? I have warned my Tito over and over again against it: because you have always done that only which was agreeable to you, and have shunned everything that was unpleasant.”