"Was ever such simplicity!" said Mrs. Dodd. "Why, my dear, that phrase
about the sea does not _mean_ anything. I shall have you believing that
Mr. So-and-So, a novelist, can _'wither fashionable folly,'_ and that _'a
painful incident'_ to one shopkeeper has _'thrown a gloom'_ over a whole
market-town, and so on. Now-a-days every third phrase is of this
character; a starling's note. Once, it appears, there was an age of gold,
and then came one of iron, and then of brass. All these are gone, and the
age of 'jargon' has succeeded."

She sighed, and Sampson generalised; he plunged from the seaside novel
into the sea of fiction. He rechristened that joyous art Feckshin, and
lashed its living professors. "You devour their three volumes greedily,"
said he, "but after your meal you feel as empty as a drum; there is no
leading idea in 'um; now there always is--in Moliere; and _he_
comprehended the midicine of his age. But what fundamental truth d'our
novelists iver convey? All they can do is pile incidents. Their customers
dictate th' article: unideaed melodrams for unideaed girls. The writers
and their feckshins belong to one species, and that's 'the
non-vertebrated animals;' and their midicine is Bosh; why, they bleed
still for falls and fevers; and niver mention vital chronometry. Then
they don't look straight at Nature, but see with their ears, and repeat
one another twelve deep. Now, listen me! there are the cracters for an
'ideaed feckshin' in Barkington, and I'd write it, too, only I haven't
time."

At this, Julia, forgetting her resolution, broke out, "Romantic
characters in Barkington? Who? who?"

"Who _should_ they be, but my pashints? Ay, ye may lauch, Miss Julee, but
wait till ye see them." He was then seized with a fit of candour, and