Her punishment, as described by Lady
Munster, is extremely severe; and when she finally commits suicide,
maddened by the imprisonment to which her husband had subjected her, it
is difficult not to feel a good deal of pity for her. Lady Munster
writes a very clever, bright style, and has a wonderful faculty of
drawing in a few sentences the most lifelike portraits of social types
and social exceptions. Sir Jasper Broke and his sister, the Duke and
Duchess of Cheviotdale, Lord and Lady Glenalmond, and Lord Baltimore, are
all admirably drawn. The 'novel of high life,' as it used to be called,
has of late years fallen into disrepute. Instead of duchesses in
Mayfair, we have philanthropic young ladies in Whitechapel; and the
fashionable and brilliant young dandies, in whom Disraeli and Bulwer
Lytton took such delight, have been entirely wiped out as heroes of
fiction by hardworking curates in the East End. The aim of most of our
modern novelists seems to be, not to write good novels, but to write
novels that will do good; and I am afraid that they are under the
impression that fashionable life is not an edifying subject. They wish
to reform the morals, rather than to portray the manners of their age.
They have made the novel the mode of propaganda. It is possible,
however, that Dorinda points to some coming change, and certainly it
would be a pity if the Muse of Fiction confined her attention entirely to
the East End.

* * * * *

The four remarkable women whom Mrs. Walford has chosen as the subjects of
her Four Biographies from 'Blackwood' are Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Fry,
Hannah More, and Mary Somerville. Perhaps it is too much to say that
Jane Taylor is remarkable. In her day she was said to have been 'known
to four continents,' and Sir Walter Scott described her as 'among the
first women of her time'; but no one now cares to read Essays in Rhyme,
or Display, though the latter is really a very clever novel and full of
capital things. Elizabeth Fry is, of course, one of the great
personalities of this century, at any rate in the particular sphere to
which she devoted herself, and ranks with the many uncanonised saints
whom the world has loved, and whose memory is sweet. Mrs. Walford gives
a most interesting account of her. We see her first a gay, laughing,
flaxen-haired girl, 'mightily addicted to fun,' pleased to be finely
dressed and sent to the opera to see the 'Prince,' and be seen by him;
pleased to exhibit her pretty figure in a becoming scarlet riding-habit,
and to be looked at with obvious homage by the young officers quartered
hard by, as she rode along the Norfolk lanes; 'dissipated' by simply
hearing their band play in the square, and made giddy by the veriest
trifle: 'an idle, flirting, worldly girl,' to use her own words. Then
came the eventful day when 'in purple boots laced with scarlet' she went
to hear William Savery preach at the Meeting House. This was the turning-
point of her life, her psychological moment, as the phrase goes. After
it came the era of 'thees' and 'thous,' of the drab gown and the beaver
hat, of the visits to Newgate and the convict ships, of the work of
rescuing the outcast and seeking the lost. Mrs.