Up to this point the book is perfect. But here comes the stumbling-block. Would a youth, whose purity and innocence would be sure to give added strength to his first sweeping passion, in the middle of an ideal honeymoon, still bewildered by his bliss, allow himself, upon such a flimsy pretext as his father’s indirectly-conveyed wish, to be separated from his bride? To be kept for months in London through the shallowest subterfuges? Would either of this passionate pair, seeing with the eyes of instinct that never errs, submit to this absurd and unreasonable separation? The Richard we know would have found a way to balk his elders and keep his bride by his side, or he would have seen through the plot, and would have flown back to her after a week’s fretting and fuming in town. This would mean the loss of a great and tragic scene--his last parting with Lucy--though the probabilities would not have been outraged. But Shakespeare himself may incur such a reproach and be not less great, and a poignant situation may be reached by the road of gross inconsistency and thrill us not the less. Having so far assisted at the launching of youth upon the waters of happiness, we are invited to assist at something still more interesting--Richard’s undertaking in the reform of spotted woman, his fall, his repentance, and his expiation. We are introduced to many new characters who do not edify us, but only one of whom is nearly irredeemably bad--one satellite of a worthless but not inhuman peer, the Hon. Peter Brayder. We have met the famous Berry, anciently the dismissed nurse, who caught Sir Austin sobbing, and own to finding her Dickensonian volubility and humour depressing in the extreme. We greet her with a grimace that does duty for a smile, which broadens into cheerfulness upon her exit. Much of the society of Mrs. Berry would, we own, fit us for Bedlam. The book is so living that it breeds the strong aversions and preferences of actual existence. The very air of reality about the woman provokes an added weariness. We endure her and listen to her as a living bore, wondering when and where she will stop, without the least inclination to skip a line devoted to her prolonged and disconnected utterances. The humour of her matrimonial differences and of the final _dénouement_ escapes us, but we tolerate it as we tolerate the rest of the infinite trials of life. In feeling that the book would be better without her, we feel it just as we feel that our sojourn in a certain place, where we spent the summer or winter, would have been the better for the absence of some other tiresome sojourner, that is all. We cannot remember the place without remembering the obnoxious visitor. So we cannot remember ‘Richard Feverel’ without recalling Mrs. Berry--an excellent woman, in the main, and an instrument of reconciliation between Sir Austin and his daughter-in-law; devoted, as bores usually are, and full of all the virtues. Mr.