Perhaps there is a fault in the tone of these novels. This may have been inferred by some strict moralists from the preceding paragraph. But they have indeed not the slightest trace of impropriety about them. They are not tainted in the slightest with the insidious viciousness of French novels. Their fault arises from rather an opposite tendency of mind and a different train of feelings. They are of the world, worldly. They are cold and sarcastic; they inculcate self-sufficiency, and preach to man to be a tower of strength in himself, not always in the praiseworthy Christian way. There is no single word of scoffing or disrespect for religion, no slur upon it whatsoever. Only we are aware, as by an instinct, that in the circle of our characters it is wholly ignored. In their world it is not an agent, whether for themselves or others. It is as unrecognized a system as is Mohammedanism or Buddhism with ourselves. The heroes have all 'seen the world' in the most thorough and terrible sense of those words. For them virtue and vice are much alike. Their wills are iron. They fix their eye upon their goal, and straight thereto they firmly march over the obstacles of precipices, through the blackness of quagmires, crashing athwart laws, customs, and conventionalities, as elephants calmly striding through underbrush. They disregard the prejudices of the world equally for evil and for good. And a moral independence which might furnish forth the most glorious of martyrs in invincible panoply is quite as likely to assist a hardy sinner. The sneer and sarcasm and contempt are for the conventionalities of the world, for the belief of the mass of mankind in right and wrong, and for the customs and habits which the republic of humanity has established for better assistance in the paths of virtue--as if, forsooth, such were vulgar because common, and to be despised by the mighty because useful to the feeble. This is not the proper spirit for the satirist. If he wields his pen in support of such a theory he will do more harm than good. A conventionality is not necessarily bad or contemptible merely as such. Not a promiscuous and indiscriminate slashing, but a careful pruning is the proper method in the garden of society. The indiscreet hand will cut what it should leave, and leave perhaps what might have been better sacrificed. The artificial trellises whereon we train our feeble virtues, which may hardly stand by their own strength, must not be shattered in a general slaughter of weeds which have taken root and nourishment in the rank soil of fashionable etiquette. Let us not dash the image from the altar, nor quench the fire at the shrine, before we have another idol and another shrine to give to the old worshippers, who must worship still. Such reckless iconoclasm is too dangerous. It is in this point of discretion that our author is most reprehensible. The moral tone of his works might have been improved had