maid. Lydgate alone has "aught of the true male principle about him."
This is a matter worthy of regard, because the charm of a novel is based largely upon the attraction its hero has for women, and its heroine for men. Incident, dialogue, the development of minor characters,—these things have power to please; but the enduring triumph of a story depends upon the depth of our infatuation for somebody that figures in it, and here, as elsewhere, the instinct of sex reigns supreme. Why is it impossible for a man, who is not an artist or an art-critic, to acknowledge that the great portraits of the world are men's portraits? Because he has given his heart to Mona Lisa, or to Rembrandt's Saskia, or to some other beauty, dead and gone. Why do we find in the Roman Catholic Church that it is invariably a man who expounds the glory of Saint Theresa, and a woman who piously supplicates Saint Anthony? The same rule holds good in fiction. Clarissa Harlowe has been loved as ardently as Helen of Troy. Mr. Saintsbury gives charming expression to this truth in his preface to "Pride and Prejudice."
