platform, the native home of bad English, heard so much in so short a time.  The mesmeric lecturer and the sickly girl are almost equally disagreeable.  In short, the only likeable person in the book is honest Silas Foster, who alone gives one the notion of a man of flesh and blood.  In my mind, dear Mr. Hawthorne mistakes exceedingly when he thinks that fiction should be based upon, or rather seen through, some ideal medium.  The greatest fictions of the world are the truest.  Look at the “Vicar of Wakefield,” look at the “Simple Story,” look at Scott, look at Jane Austen, greater because truer than all, look at the best works of your own Cooper.  It is precisely the want of reality in his smaller stories which has delayed Mr. Hawthorne’s fame so long, and will prevent its extension if he do not resolutely throw himself into truth, which is as great a thing in my mind in art as in morals, the foundation of all excellence in both.  The fine parts of this book, at least the finest, are the truest,—­that magnificent search for the body, which is as perfect as the search for the exciseman in Guy Mannering, and the burst of passion in Eliot’s pulpit.  The plot, too, is very finely constructed, and doubtless I have been a too critical reader, because, from the moment you and I parted, I have been suffering from fever, and have never left the bed, in which I am now writing.  Don’t fancy, dear friend, that you had anything to do with this.  The complaint had fixed itself and would have run its course, even although your ... society has not roused and excited the good spirits, which will, I think, fail only with my life.  I think I am going to get better.  Love to all.

    Ever most affectionately yours, M.R.M.

    Tuesday. (No date.)

My Dear Friend:  Being fit for nothing but lying in bed and reading novels, I have just finished Mr. Field’s and Mr. Jones’s “Adrien,” and as you certainly will not have time to look at it, and may like to hear my opinion, I will tell it to you.  Mr. Field, from the Preface, is of New York.  The thing that has diverted me most is the love-plot of the book.  A young gentleman, whose father came and settled in America and made a competence there, is third or fourth cousin to an English lord.  He falls in love with a fisherman’s daughter (the story appears to be about fifty years back).  This fisherman’s daughter is a most ethereal personage, speaking and reading Italian, and possessing in the fishing-cottage a pianoforte and a collection of books; nevertheless, she one day hears her husband say something about a person being “well born and well bred,” and forthwith goes away from him, in order to set him free from the misery entailed upon him, as she supposes, by a disproportionate marriage.  Is not this curious in your republic?  We in England certainly should not play such pranks.  A man having married a wife, his wife stays by him.  This dilemma is got over by the fisherman’s turning out