himself undertook to continue the tale of Ivanhoe and Rowena, whom Scott abandoned to their fate, with merely a gentle hint of some mental deviations on the bridegroom's part. Sir Walter, indeed, always shook hands with his young couples on their wedding-day, and left them to pull through as best they could. Their courtships and their marriages interested him less than other things he wanted to write about,—sieges and tournaments, criminal trials, and sour Scottish saints. He had lived his own life bravely and happily without his heart's desire; he believed that it was the fate of most men to do the same; and he clung stoutly to Dryden's axiom:—
Secrets of marriage still are sacred held,
Their sweet and bitter from the world concealed.
In real life this admirable reticence is a thing of the past; but the novelist, for the most part, holds his peace, leaving his readers a prey to melancholy doubts and misgivings.
The English-speaking novelist only. In French fiction, as Mr. Lang points out, "love comes after marriage punctually enough, but it is always love for another." The inevitable-
