result from the still mystifying married life of the pair--the story which had begun so well in the first volume of _Consuelo_, and which in the major part of _Consuelo_ itself, though not throughout, maintains the satisfaction fairly. [Sidenote: The "making good" of _Lucrezia Floriani_.] If any reader, in two ways gentle, has been good enough to take some interest in the analysis of these books, but is also so soft-hearted as to feel slightly _froisse_ by it, as showing a disqualifying inability to sympathise with the author, I hope I may put myself right by what I am going to say of another. _Lucrezia Floriani_ is to me the most remarkable book that George Sand ever wrote; and the nearest to a great one, if it be not actually that. I have read it, with no diminution of interest and no abatement of esteem, at very different times of my life, and I think that it is on the whole not only the most perfect revelation of what at any rate the author would have liked to be her own temperament, but--a much greater thing--a presentment in possible and human form of a real temperament, and almost of a real character. Further, it is much the most achieved example of that peculiar style of which more will be said in a general way presently, and it contains comparatively few blots. One always smiles, of course, at the picture of Lucrezia swinging in a hammock in the centre of a large room, the four corners of which are occupied by four bedsteads containing four children, in the production of whom not exactly _four_ fathers, as they ought for perfect symmetry, but as a compromise _three_, have assisted. One always shudders at her notion of restoring a patient, suffering under a nervous ailment, by surrounding his couch with the cherubic countenances and the balmy breaths of these infants.[185] Prince Karol, the hero (such as there is), is a poor creature, though not such a cad as Stenio; but then, according to Madame Dudevant, men as a rule _were_ poor creatures, unless they were convicts or conjurors, so the presentation is _ex hypothesi_ or _secundum hypothesin_ correct. And the whole is firmly drawn and well, but neither gaudily nor pitchily, coloured. It ought to be remembered that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, who has no peer or second among lady novelists, these either confine themselves to representation of manners, external character, _ton_, as was said of Fanny Burney, or else, like the other "George" and Charlotte Bronte, endeavour to represent themselves as they are or as they would like to be on the canvas. They never create; if they "imitate" not in the degraded modern but the original classical sense, and do it well, _punctum ferunt_--_suum_ if not _omne_. [Sidenote: The story.]