This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

was rightfully "odious" in her author's eyes, and that she was "created to be exposed," which sounds a little like the stern creed which held that men were created to be damned. Trollope, oppressed by her dissimilarity to Grace Crawley and to Lily Dale, openly mourned her shortcomings; and a writer in "Frazier's Magazine" assured the rank and file of the respectable that in real life they would shrink from her as from an infection. One voice only, that of an unknown critic in a little-read review, was raised in her defence. This brave man admitted without flinching her many sins, but added that he loved her.

The more lenient standards of our day have lifted Rebecca's reputation into the realm of disputable things. So distinguished a moralist as Mr. William Dean Howells praised her tepidly; being disposed in her favour by a distaste, not for Amelia, but for