The estate takes a passage into the female line,
and the old name becomes extinct, nor does Middleton seek to continue it
by resuming it in place of the one long ago assumed by his ancestor.
Thus he and his wife become the Adam and Eve of a new epoch, and the
fitting missionaries of a new social faith, of which there must be
continual hints through the book.
A knot of characters may be introduced as gathering around Middleton,
comprising expatriated Americans of all sorts: the wandering printer who
came to me so often at the Consulate, who said he was a native of
Philadelphia, and could not go home in the thirty years that he had been
trying to do so, for lack of the money to pay his passage; the large
banker; the consul of Leeds; the woman asserting her claims to half
Liverpool; the gifted literary lady, maddened by Shakespeare, etc., etc.
The Yankee who had been driven insane by the Queen's notice, slight as it
was, of the photographs of his two children which he had sent her. I
have not yet struck the true key-note of this Romance, and until I do,
and unless I do, I shall write nothing but tediousness and nonsense. I
do not wish it to be a picture of life, but a Romance, grim, grotesque,
quaint, of which the Hospital might be the fitting scene.
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