We hail a production like this, so scholarlike and serene, so remote from the trivialities and vulgarities of ambitious book-makers, with pleasure and pride. We are thankful--let us add in a whisper--for a story, with love and woman in it, which does not rustle with _crinoline_; that most useful of inventions for ladies with limited outlines, and literary man-milliners with scanty brains; which has filled more than half the space in our drawing-rooms, and nearly as large a part of some of our periodicals, since the Goddesses of Grace and of Dulness united to bestow the precious gift on Beauties and Boeotians.
A story deals with human nature and time. All that is truly human is interesting, however abstractly stated; but it requires the _mordant_ of specific circumstance, involving some historical period, to make it stain permanently. Everything that belongs to Time, as his private property,--everything _temporary_, using that word in its ordinary sense,--is uninteresting, except so far as it serves to fix the colors of that humanity which we always love to contemplate. The statuary, who cares nothing about Time, loves to drop his costuming, trumpery altogether. The cheap story, written for the day, is dressed in all the fashionable articles that can be laid upon it, like the revolving lady in a shop window. The real story, which alone outlives the _modíste's_ bonnets and shawls, may drape itself as it pleases; for it does not depend on its _peplos_, or _stola_, on its _stomacher_, or _basque_,--or _crinoline_, for its effect.
"Parthenia" is a tale of the fourth century, but it tells the experience of lofty souls in all centuries. The particular period chosen is one of the deepest interest,--that of the conflict of expiring Paganism with growing Christianity, under Julian the Apostate. Julian's character, as drawn in the story, may be considered as a true historical study. The "grand _conservative_ of the fourth century," as Mrs. Lee calls him, is painted as a violent and arbitrary man, but always sincere and noble in his delusions. He never loses our respect, and we admire as often as pity him. When people, professing to believe that a few sestertia invested in papyri and sent to their barbarian neighbors would be sure to save hundreds or thousands of fellow-creatures from an eternity of inconceivable agony, do, notwithstanding, expend great sums on "snow-white mules and golden harness," to carry them to the Basilica, or on any other selfish gratification whatsoever, we cannot wonder that Julian, or anybody else, is ready to take up the pleasant "creed outworn" which Wordsworth half yearns after in his famous sonnet, as preferable to that base system of psychophagy prevailing in the church of Antioch.