Heroines should not only be beautiful, but should be endowed also with a quasi celestial grace,--grace of dignity, propriety, and reticence.

A heroine should hardly want to be married, the arrangement being almost too mundane,--and, should she be brought to consent to undergo such bond, because of its acknowledged utility, it should be at some period so distant as hardly to present itself to the mind as a reality.

Eating and drinking should be altogether indifferent to her, and her clothes should be picturesque rather than smart, and that from accident rather than design.

Thackeray's Amelia does not at all come up to the description here given.

She is proud of having a lover, constantly declaring to herself and to others that he is "the greatest and the best of men,"-- whereas the young gentleman is, in truth, a very little man.