The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-06-09

| business and bosoms as it may at first appear
to be. Thanks to the community Of tongues,
| we read English novels as freely in America.
as they areTead in England, and there can be
no doubt that the pictures of life painted in
these novels have positive effect upon con-
siderable numbers of people in America. For
the most part this effect is bad. The sort of
| persons who dawdle or drive as the case may
| be, through the majority of English fash
ionable novels are carcatured specimens of
kind of society which is itself caricature.
With the exception of Mr.. Disraeli,
has had the eyes to see
or the courage to depict the utter
emptiness, the grotesque, more than Chinese
self-suffciency, and the solemn stupidity of
aristocratic life in England in the nineteenth
century. The average English novelist,
finding in the noble mansions, the high
sounding titles-echoes of a once illustrious
past-the paradisaical parks, the glittering
households of the English aristocracy ad-
mirable scenic effects and excellent accesso-
ries for dramatic work, has only to be at the
pains of inventing heroes and heroines to
move amid these enchanting circumstances.
This he gladly does. He clothes the necks of
his young peers with thunder, like the war
horse in job, and invests his damsels with
fawnlike grace, with dovelike innocence, or
with the deadly fascination of the leopardess,
as his case may require.
Around these ideal beings set in real
scenes he pours an atmosphere of flunkyism
and frivolity, and the result is novel per-
fectly fitted to make fools of all such inexpe-
rienced readers as it finds not fools already
In nothing are these novels more detestable
than in the conceptions taken for granted by
their authors of the relations which should
exist between the rich and great on one side
and the dependents of the rich and great on
the other side. We have no peerage in Ame-
RIGA, and the vulgarzing influence of a
peerage upon society is not likely to be felt
among us, even by reflection, to any consid-
erable degree in the intercourse of people
who meet each other simply as strangers or
acquaintance in the world. There are we
believe, vague forthputtings of
this influence sometimes observ-
able in the weighty matter of precedence
at Washington dinner-tables. Bat as
Washington dinner-tables are here to-day, and
tomorrow are removed to the auction mart or
exported to Peoria, and as the discussion of
precedence at Washington dinner-tables is
pretty sure always to end only in making the
silly people who engage in it hate and avoid
each other ever after, no great harm can come
of it. But it is otherwise with the relations of
employer and employed. These exist in all
countries. Wherever the native instincts
and traditional habits of American life as
Gated classes in times past still prevail
nothing can be more wholesome, honorable,
or admirable than the American way of treat
ing these relations. 1t is for their delete
rious effect upon these relations chiefly that
the English novels of which we speak are to
be deprecated. They paint an order of ideas
not much longer to be endured even in Great
Britain; an order of ideas utterly odious and
intolerable in America. Wherefore it we're
hat ha hn to
reform American society should not lose sight
of this valiant little Tichborne governess,
who so steadily refused to be "put down"
even by so awful parsonage as the Solicitor
General of England Indeed, the whole
Tichborne case is worth dissemination were
it only as an antidote to the false and silly
notions of aristocratic life engendered
by the fashionable story-tellers of
Great Britain. Neither Mrs. Gore nor
Mrs Wood, neither Wilkie Collins nor
the author of "Guy Livingstone" ever
concocted more interesting and dramatic
tale than the true history of the Tichborne
| baronetcy 1t has all the elements and ac-
cessories. There is an ancient family, of
blood SO blue that in comparison with it the
| descendants of the tradesman who founded
the ducal house of Cavendish and of the
apothecary who rescued the more than
ducal name of Percy from extinction are
the veriest ''cads." There is an ancestral
mansion full of legends and of pictures.
There is magnificent property, and a
title which, if not brilliant, is at least title.
There are circumstances throbbing with
romance and mystery. And yet, when we
get at the personages involved in all this fine
glamour of things, we find them to be dull,
coarse, illiterate. They appear through the
splendor and charm of the drama like q
stage-carpenter suddenly caught in his shirt
sleeves in the midst of splendid ''transfor
nation scene"--commonplace and bewildered
among the spangled heavens and the shining
nymphs, the purple waters and the rose-pinl
grottoes of the fairy world. The upholstery
is faultless. The characters provoke one tx
remember Goldsmith's cruel description of 1
hog