indifferent parent, starting out with a great many gallant promises on behalf of his offspring, and easily forgetting all about them. Miss Burney was as cheerfully unconscious of her own grave obligations to society as was Miss Austen; while in those few lines with which Sir Walter Scott closes "The Heart of Mid-Lothian"—lines addressed to the "reader," and containing some irrefutable but not very original remarks about the happiness of virtue and the infelicity of vice—we see an almost pathetic avowal on the part of the great novelist that, in the mere delight of telling his beautiful and best loved tale, he had well-nigh lost sight of any moral lesson it might be fitted to convey, and was trying at the last moment to make amends for this deficiency. Imagine George Eliot forgetting, or permitting her readers to forget, the moral lesson of "Adam Bede," when every fresh development of character or of narrative has for its conscious purpose the driving home of hard and bitter truths. No need for the authoress of "Romola" to wind up her story with that paragraph of excellent advice to poor little Lillo, who is after all rather young to profit
