The French novelist who should describe, as his central figure, a self-disciplined, straightforward, healthy young woman, honestly in love with her husband, rationally fond of her children, not given to dangerous musings about the need of her soul for an elective affinity outside her marriage bond, nor spending her hours in speculating on the philosophy of necessity as represented by Léon or Alphonse; who should make her absolutely impervious to the sickly sentimentalism of the inevitable _célibat_, and neither palter with peril nor lament that sin should be sinful when it is so pleasant; who should paint domestic morality as we know it exists in France no less than in England, and trust for his interest to the quiet pathos of unfriendly but cleanly circumstances, would be hard put to it to make his heroine attractive and his story popular; and his readers would not be counted by tens of thousands, as were those who gloated over the sins of _Madame Bovary_ and the prurience of _Fanny_. The Scandinavian type of woman again, strong-armed, independent, athletic, practical, would not go down with the French reading public; wherefore we may assume that the _Parisienne_, as we know her in romance--feverish, subtil, casuistic, self-deluding, and always ready to sacrifice duty to sentiment--is the woman best liked by the people to whom she is offered, and that the novelist but repeats and represents the wish of his readers. So, too, when our own novelists carry their stock puppets through the nine hundred pages held to be necessary for the due display of their follies and disasters, we may be sure that they are of the kind which finds favour in the eyes of the ordinary English reader; that the girls are the girls who please young men or do not alarm mothers, and that the men are the men in whom women delight, and think the ideals of their sex. If, as it is said, the delineation of her hero is the touchstone of a woman's literary power, it must be confessed that the touchstone discloses, for the most part, a very feeble amount of literary power, and that the female mind has but a small perception of all that relates to man's needs and nature.