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exception of Lady Marchmont, they may find their prototypes among the varied scenes of social life. While they owe much of their interest to the poetical manner of their delineation, they also appear before us, not as the mere automata of fiction, but as actual existences animated with the life-breath of thought, feeling and action. This has required the master skill of the author, who, in placing before us the beings of the mind, has not only invested them with fancied attributes, but moulded them into very personifications of certain qualities and characteristics, which are manifested in their true nature amidst suitable circumstances,—portraits, in fact, whose realities we may often encounter in our every-day intercourse with mankind.
Take, for example, Lord Marchmont; he stands out as the robed and elected representative of his class,—that class, the pettiest, most self-loving, and self-privileged egotists to be found throughout the proprietorships of human nature. His character is the condensed and preserved essence of selfishness. How is this exemplified in every scene where his rigid and formal figure appears before us, looking and proving incapable of the slightest impulse of generous, or kindly, or considerate feeling,-as if his very soul were petrified into insensibility by the continual action of self-love! We scarcely wonder to hear such a man command his wife to put off her mourning for her dearest friend, because the husband of that friend was in the Opposition, and he (Lord Marchmont) would not have the reigning Minister of the day inquire the cause of Lady Marchmont's melancholy dress and appearance! We cannot be surprised even to find such a character, after uttering the sentence of final separation from his repentant and humbled wife, hurrying from her apartment, lest his delay should spoil
