ABSTRACT
The filial relations of novel-writers may be supposed to have grown happier of late, if people believe that their former illustrations were drawn from personal experience. For instance, in novels the chief end and aim of existence is, of course, love. Nothing else is thought of, nothing else is lived for, by all men and women under thirty, in three-volume life. That respectable age, indeed, if people allow themselves the latitude prescribed by a certain recent class of fiction, will not serve as the limit beyond which passionate and engrossing devotion - a life-long ardor, and so forth - may not be expected as a matter of course. Probably this misconception, and the undue elevation of the masculine ideal in this respect, arises from the predominance of female writers of fiction, who, in describing man under these circumstances, involuntarily delineate themselves. But it will not do - the substitution will be detected.
