Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/140

138 are introduced at once in their true colors, with an amiable frankness which precludes possibility of mistake. There can be no doubt as to the identity of polished villain, or poor but virtuous hero. There is no complication of mixed personality in which good and evil struggle for the mastery, and sympathy swings like a pendulum between disgust and admiration. The narrative moves through quiet regions of commonplace until some lofty trait or some deep wickedness needs illustration, when it suddenly bounds into the mazes of melodrama, and the reader finds himself tossed upon stormy billows of heroism, passion, or remorse, as the case may be. In justice, it must be acknowledged that these transitions are infrequent; otherwise the sensation would be too much that of mental seasickness. The quiet, homely life which "Guadalupe" depicts, speaks well for the people who furnish such a record; and the popular taste which accepts such placid chronicles of gentle love and religiously tempered hate is, at least, evidence of a purer and more wholesome temperament than that which subsists upon the vicious sensationalism of the American dime-novel or the outrageous vulgarity of "Peck's