Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/98

 only by Mrs. Brunton, whose two novels, "Self-Control" and "Discipline," were designed "to procure admission for the religion of a sound mind and of the Bible where it cannot find access in any other form." Mrs. Brunton was perhaps the most commended novelist of her time. The inexorable titles of her stories secured for them a place upon the guarded book-shelves of the young. Many a demure English girl must have blessed these deluding titles, just as, forty years later, many an English boy blessed the inspiration which had impelled George Borrow to misname his immortal book "The Bible in Spain." When the wife of a clergyman undertook to write a novel in the interests of religion and the Scriptures; when she called it "Discipline," and drew up a stately apology for employing fiction as a medium for the lessons she meant to convey, what parent could refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing trivial in Mrs. Brunton's conception of a good novel, in the standard she proposes to the world.

"Let the admirable construction of fable in 'Tom Jones' be employed to unfold characters like Miss Edgeworth's; let it lead to a moral