Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/102

 86 belief in the supremacy of feminine charms. A heroine of seventeen (she is seldom older), with ringlets, and a "faltering timidity," inflames both the virtuous and the profligate with such imperishable passions, that when triumphant morality leads her to the altar, defeated vice cannot survive her loss. Her suitors, reversing the enviable experience of Ben Bolt,—

They grow faint with rapture when they enter her presence, and, when she repels their advances, they signify their disappointment by gnashing their teeth, and beating their heads against the wall. Rejection cannot alienate their faithful hearts; years and absence cannot chill their fervour. They belong to a race of men who, if they ever existed at all, are now as extinct as the mastodon.

It was Miss Jane Porter who successfully transferred to a conquering hero that exquisite sensibility of soul which had erstwhile belonged to the conquering heroine,—to the Emmelines and Adelinas of fiction. Dipping her pen "in the tears of Poland," she conveyed the