for instance, and not Mr. Stanley Weyman, who confides to us what we had never even suspected,—the veritist's lack of control over the characters he has created. "He cannot shove them about," we are told, and are amazed to hear it, "nor marry them, nor kill them. What they do, they do by their own will, or through nature's arrangement. Their very names come by some singular attraction. The veritist cannot name his characters arbitrarily."
Small wonder he finds his task a hard one! Small wonder he says so much about the difficulties which beset him! He does his duty by Mary Jane, provides her with a lover, and laboriously strives to strew with novelistic thorns the devious paths of courtship. What must be his sentiments, when the ungrateful hussy refuses, after all his trouble, to marry the young man. Or perhaps she declines to be called Mary Ann, and insists that her name is Arabella, to his great annoyance and discomfiture. Lurid possibilities of revolt suggest themselves on every side, until the unhappy novel-writer, notwithstanding his detestation of the "feudal ideal," as illustrated
