Those who desire (he says) to make the acquaintance of this somewhat remarkable person have only to step with us into the little dusky room where he is seated, and we shall have much pleasure in introducing him to their notice.

—­A sentence which has certainly the air of saying, ’You may be introduced to him, or you may let it alone.’

The coolness with which everything is said and done in penny fiction is indeed most remarkable, and should greatly recommend it to that respectable class who have a horror of ‘sensation.’  In a story, for example, that purports to describe University life (and is as much like it as the camel produced from the German professor’s self-consciousness must have been to a real camel) there is an underplot of an amazing kind.  The wicked undergraduate, notwithstanding that he has the advantage of being a baronet, is foiled in his attempt to win the affections of a young woman in humble life, and the virtuous hero of the story recommends her to the consideration of his negro servant: 

  ‘Talk to her, Monday,’ whispered Jack, ‘and see if she loves you.’

  For a short time Monday and Ada were in close conversation.

  Then Monday uttered a cry like a war-whoop.

  ’It am come all right, sare.  Missy Ada says she not really care for
  Sir Sydney, and she will be my little wife,’ he said.

  ‘I congratulate you, Monday,’ answered Jack.

  In half an hour more they arrived at the house of John Radford,
  plumber and glazier, who was Ada’s father.

Mr. and Mrs. Radford and their two sons received their daughter and her companions with that unstudied civility which contrasts so favourably with the stuck-up ceremony of many in a higher position.  They were not prejudiced against Monday on account of his dark skin.

  It was enough for them that he was the man of Ada’s choice.

Mrs. Radford even went so far as to say, ’Well, for a coloured gentleman, he is very handsome and quite nice mannered, though I think Ada’s been a little sly in telling us nothing about her engagement to the last.’

  They did not know all.

  Nor was it advisable that they should.

Still they knew something—­for example, that their new son-in-law was a black man, which one would have thought might have struck them as phenomenal.  They take it, however, quite quietly and as a matter of course.  Now, surely, even among plumbers and glaziers, it must be thought as strange for one’s daughter to marry a black man as a lord.  Yet, out of this dramatic situation the author makes nothing at all, but treats it as coolly as his dramatis personae do themselves.  Now my notion would have been to make the bridegroom a black lord, and then to portray, with admirable skill, the conflicting emotions of his mother-in-law, disgusted on the one hand by his colour, attracted on the other by his rank.  But ‘sensation’ is evidently out of the line of the penny novelist:  he gives his facts, which are certainly remarkable, then leaves both his characters and his readers to draw their own conclusions.