EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 91 



emotion, the story of her married life. It is a melan- 

 choly phase of the general order of things which puts 

 marriage at that period of life when experience and 

 judgment are most wanting, and wanting especially in 

 the slowly unfolding impassioned nature, while ex- 

 perience is ripe enough where it is least needed, on the 

 brink of the grave. The teller of the story, full of 

 affection and poetry and perhaps visions, is wedded to 

 an unintellectual, unemotional, arid, trivial, but highly 

 respectable member of her father's denomination. She 

 is intensely wretched. At a little gathering of friends 

 the conversation leads to her reciting a favourite poem 

 and her whole nature is thrown into the task. The 

 last word is scarcely off her lips when the husband 

 turns to a guest to ask after the welfare of her cat. It 

 was a straw ; it was not quite the last straw, but the 

 last came quickly, and she slid by night out of a 

 presence to which she never returned. To her a diet 

 of straw for life was more than she could bear ; to her 

 it was not the beautiful bearing of a cross, it was a 

 lasting degradation and therefore a constantly growing 

 deterioration of body and soul. Her listener obtains a 

 glimpse of a miniature portrait taken at her marriage : 

 significantly enough it revealed a straight spine, and 

 consequently a head which was " thrown back with a 

 kind of firmness/' The hair and eye-brows were also 

 probably marked more by decision than by softness. 



It is beyond question that fiction is at the present 

 time, whether for good or evil, an immense social force. 

 It is a steadily growing and, in prospect, an illimitable 

 force. The widening of all boundaries, or as some 

 would say, the bursting of all bonds, seems to be its 

 special aim. It assumes that all views, all principles, 

 all beliefs are doomed which are so fragile that they 



