But in spite of these faults, the book has one great merit, which is not too common; it seems to be the truthful story of a real life. This impression is partly the result of a peculiarity of style which is very difficult to express otherwise than by saying that the use of language seems to indicate that the writer is of the condition of life in which Mary Smith professes to have been born, and has acquired a knowledge of language and literature in the manner in which she relates that she acquired hers. There is no vulgarity, but a certain air of constrained propriety, and an absence of any elegance, or grace, or indications of a slow and unconsciously acquired acquaintance with the phraseology of cultivated society. If this be really assumed, the author has exhibited a delicate refinement in the art of writing not surpassed in any work of imagination known to us. Another ground for the seeming actuality of the story, to those who have any knowledge of the class to which its heroine belongs, is the cause to which she attributes her fall. This was not seduction; for she confesses, what hardly one in a thousand of her sisters in shame will fail to confess, if they speak the truth, that she was not seduced;--and neither was it poverty; for her father was well-to-do, and she the petted attendant, almost the friend, of a young lady of wealth and station;--but it was her vanity and her unrestrained passion. She is represented, in the first place, as regarding a good match, a rich husband, as the great object of life; and to such a woman chastity is not a sentiment, but a dictate of prudence; just as to a man whose great purpose is the getting of money, honesty is but the best policy. After she has met the man who brings her fate with him, (it might as well have been any other of his class,) she writes,--"The one great pleasing and wretched hope of my mind was that I should see him again; for it is so pleasant to believe that any man in a higher station should take an interest in me." And again she speaks of "exultation at the prospect which opened before me of being raised out of the station in life from which I sprang by birth"; and again, of her "desire of being a lady." This vanity it is, this desire to dress and live like the women above them, and have intercourse with the men above them, which leads the greater number of our fallen women to their ruin, or, rather, sends them to it with their eyes open; and for the rest, when Mary Smith, living in her own fine house, the petted mistress of the wealthy Mr. Plowden, was unfaithful to him, it was not for love of fine clothes or fine society. It is not long since our whole country was shocked by the dire results of a similar abandonment to vanity and wantonness, about which the usual amount of commonplace and cant was uttered. It is time that the very truth was told about this matter, in sad earnestness and singleness of purpose. We hoped to