Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/89

Rh chapter in the History of England, and the blinds are the moral! As to domestic adventures we have none—only the chimneys were kind enough to be blown down the other day, which did produce a sensation. I thought the whole house was coming, and began to bid myself an affectionate good bye. Also a new pump has been built in the square, and never before did I duly prize the blessings of a rainy morning—for, at five o'clock they begin to water the road, and truly this said pump enacts the part of Macbeth, and murders sleep. . . . I have just married my heroine—a thing very symptomatic of a closing volume. Only three chapters now remain, and glad enough shall I be when they are done."

The heroine whose marriage, as symptomatic of a close, is thus rejoiced in, was "Francesca Carrara;" a performance that wrung from the severest of her critics, and the most prejudiced of her readers, the amplest admission of her great qualifications as a writer of romantic fiction. They could no longer affect to regard her as the mere singer of idle love-songs, or the weaver of fanciful ballads "without a moral;" but while they acknowledged her powerful conceptions of character—her truth and knowledge, which is the truth and knowledge of woman only, in the delineation of woman—the spirit and brilliancy of her set-scenes—her frequent wit and occasional eloquence, they acknowledged too that she was yet unversed in the essential art of using her powers with any proportionate effect. That her real deficiencies were pointed out, however, in some quarters, with temper and discernment, and that the enlargement of her genius, as denoted in many of the scenes and characters of her new work, was ungrudgingly recognized, it may