Note
of course, to the salutary conventions of the social order.
Such is the régime under which Literature, as obedient and useful to its masters as any good civil servant, exists in England; the journalism of our less strenuous moments—the leading article, the social column, the Divorce Report of those serious morning half-hours in the train, reduced to a more attractive form, in which Fancy gilds the shape of the Higher Critic, and Marriage Reform appears in even more attractive colours than it had assumed in the Divorce Court or the Police Column. Art, it has been well observed, excels and surpasses life; so while the hard truth of the newspaper seems at times almost a history of blackguards and wantons, fiction with gentle, serious hand shows us virtually the same characters as the Luthers and Calvins of a new social era, as hedonist philosophers or priestesses of Humanity. And on the lighter side of the literary art; who has not enjoyed a letter from an aunt in the country, giving the last news of six parishes, with births, marriages, deaths, dances, and engagements, to say nothing of the hunting? What more delightful than a book which is practically just such a letter extended to five hundred pages, breathing the calm of the vicarage, exuding, as it were, the quinta
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