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 to his recognized insight into the workings of the human heart. That he possessed no mean power of psychological analysis of motives is shown by many a passage in his very first novels. Sometimes his expression of a quite common and simple observation could be altogether delightful in its simplicity, as when

More subtle analysis is seen in the following:

Despite his constant and consistent aim at truth to life, he departed, at the outset of his career, from the rock-bound principles of the stricter Naturalists, in his advocation of the principles of the necessary selection and artistic ordering of the facts of life as observed, in order to reproduce, as the resultant effect, the writer's personal interpretation of the ultimate significance, or non-significance, of things in general. Thus we find him in full accord with the most famous novelist of the English Romanticists in the motto he prefixed to Desperate Remedies: