The parson.  Plots are no more exhausted than men are.  Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.  Even if we did not have new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be exhausted on them.  I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but I can never reproduce a figure.  No, no.  I cannot say that you may not exhaust everything else:  we may get all the secrets of a nature into a book by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it deals with men.

The Parson’s vehemence came very near carrying him into a sermon; and as nobody has the privilege of replying to his sermons, so none of the circle made any reply now.

Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing on end, to hear a minister defending the novel; but it did not interrupt the general silence.  Silence is unnoticed when people sit before a fire; it would be intolerable if they sat and looked at each other.

The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville remarked, as they rose to go, that it had a spring sound in it, but it was as cold as winter.  The Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing in the sun a spring song, it was a winter bird, but it sang.

SEVENTH STUDY

We have been much interested in what is called the Gothic revival.  We have spent I don’t know how many evenings in looking over Herbert’s plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his vain efforts to cover with Gothic roofs the vast number of large rooms which the Young Lady draws in her sketch of a small house.

I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is capable of infinite modification, so that every house built in that style may be as different from every other house as one tree is from every other, can be adapted to our modern uses, and will be, when artists catch its spirit instead of merely copying its old forms.  But just now we are taking the Gothic very literally, as we took the Greek at one time, or as we should probably have taken the Saracenic, if the Moors had not been colored.  Not even the cholera is so contagious in this country as a style of architecture which we happen to catch; the country is just now broken out all over with the Mansard-roof epidemic.

And in secular architecture we do not study what is adapted to our climate any more than in ecclesiastic architecture we adopt that which is suited to our religion.

We are building a great many costly churches here and there, we Protestants, and as the most of them are ill adapted to our forms of worship, it may be necessary and best for us to change our religion in order to save our investments.  I am aware that this would be a grave step, and we should not hasten to throw overboard Luther and the right of private judgment without reflection.  And yet, if it is necessary to revive the ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not in its spirit (that we nowhere do), but in the form which served another age and another faith, and if, as it appears, we have already a great deal of money invested in this reproduction, it may be more prudent to go forward than to go back.  The question is, “Cannot one easier change his creed than his pew?”