never would have been our hero, if it had. When you add, that "his manners were thoroughly refined, and his property large enough and not too large for leisure," why, one might almost send a sheriff to arrest him, trusting to this description to make sure of his identity. The heroine is of course the "pale, quiet, earnest-looking girl," who, in the midst of snoods, frocks, jackets, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other commonplace handicraft, is embroidering with green silk upon warm brown cloth the thready stems and frail diminishing fronds of a group of fern-leaves,--who alone among assured matrons and faded spinsters is visited by "a flitting blush, delicate and transient as the shadow of a rose tossed upon marble,"--and who matches the "glorious lay" of the hero, that "thrilled and shook her with its despairing solemnity," with an Alpine song, that, pure and sweet, sets the hero once more face to face with the Rosenlaui glacier and the jagged pyramid of the Wetterhorn. To this there is no special objection. Every man has a right to heap virtues and graces upon his hero, and to heighten their effect by as much uncouthness and insincerity as he chooses to attribute to the subordinates; but so far as he professes to represent life, he should keep within the bounds of natural laws. If he chooses to introduce time-honored personages, we shall not quarrel with him, although we certainly think it desirable that some fresh piquancy in their characters shall be the vindication of their reappearance. We may regret that a subtle, but palpable ridicule is cast upon foreign missions,--a cause which, whether successful or unsuccessful in its immediate objects, will forever stand recorded as one of the most unselfish, the most sublime, and the most Christ-like movements that have ever been originated by man. The hero does, indeed, patronize them to the extent of saying that he has "seen something of your missions in India, and believes that they are capable of accomplishing much good,"--adding, however, lest his words excite hopes too sanguine, "Still, you must not expect immediate returns. It is only the lowest caste that is now reached, and the Christianizing of India must come, eventually, from the highest,"--words which we shall be very ready to take as opinion, but very slow to receive as oracle, since, from the time when the Founder of Christianity was upon the earth, and the common people heard him gladly, while the higher classes thrust him out of their synagogues, till the present day, the history of Christianity has been the history of an influence rising from the lower layers of society into the upper, rather than filtering down from the upper into the lower.