As an offset to this, we recur to the story of “Sir Charles Grandison.” In proof of the “humorous character” of Charlotte Grandison, we are told that soon after her marriage her husband made her a present of some old china. “And when he had done,” writes she to Harriet Byron, “taking the _liberty_, as he phrased it, half fearful, half resolute, to salute his bride for his reward, and then pacing backwards several steps with such a strut and crow—I see him yet,—indulge me, Harriet!—I burst into a hearty laugh; I could not help it; and he, reddening, looked round himself and round himself to see if anything was amiss on his part. The _man_, the _man_, honest friend,—I could have said, but had too much reverence for my husband,—is the oddity; nothing amiss in the garb.” It is remarkable, says Forsyth, that some of the most immoral novels in the English language should have been written by women. This bad distinction belongs to Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Heywood. _Corruptio optimi est pessima_, and that such corrupt stories as they gave to the world were the offspring of female pens is an unmistakable proof of the loose manners of the age. It is impossible, without the risk of offence, to quote freely from the works of an age when vice and indelicacy were triumphant and modesty had left its last footsteps upon earth. It is refreshing to pass from their details of profligacy, and the insidious mischief of their assaults upon domestic purity, to that later school of fiction which, as Lord Bacon says, “serveth and conformeth to magnanimity, morality, and delectation.” Foremost among those at the dawn of the present century, whose ideals are framed according to the healthful and ennobling standards which conform to the government and will of God and which command the reverence of man, was Miss Jane Porter. If her heroes are paragons like Grandison, they are not, like Sir Charles, models of solemn foppery, insipid in their superiority, correct as automata in their elaborate politeness, or passing their lives, as Taine says, “in weighing their duties and making salutations.” They are quite as irreproachable, while they are far more consistent with the conditions of our human nature and our human life. It would be interesting to trace the course of Sobieski, in “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” from the time when, as an enforced exile, he dropped on his knees and, “plucking a turf of grass and pressing it to his lips, exclaimed, ‘Farewell, Poland! farewell all my hopes of happiness!’” to the hour when he clasped his newly-wedded wife at the grave of Butzou. But two extracts will suffice to show what manner of man he was. Upon reading for the third time a letter from Lady Tinemouth containing assurances of Miss Beaufort’s high regard for him, his heart throbbed with violent emotion: