To enter that sphere a man must be born within it; and
untaught peasants have there drawn their first breath, while learned
philosophers have striven hard till old age to reach it, and have
never succeeded." I should not dare, nor would it be right, to say
this to Mr. Lewes, but I cannot help thinking it both of him and many
others who have a great name in the world.
'Hester Mason's character, career, and fate appeared to me so
strange, grovelling, and miserable, that I never for a moment doubted
the whole dreary picture was from the life. I thought in describing
the "rustic poetess," in giving the details of her vulgar provincial
and disreputable metropolitan notoriety, and especially in touching
on the ghastly catastrophe of her fate, he was faithfully recording
facts--thus, however repulsively, yet conscientiously "pointing a
moral," if not "adorning a tale"; but if Hester be the daughter of
Lewes's imagination, and if her experience and her doom be inventions
of his fancy, I wish him better, and higher, and truer taste next
time he writes a novel.
'Julius's exploit with the side of bacon is not defensible; he might
certainly, for the fee of a shilling or sixpence, have got a boy to
carry it for him.
'Captain Heath, too, must have cut a deplorable figure behind the
post-chaise.
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