Contrast the genial spirit in which the writer records the adventures and difficulties of this splendid charlatan with the spirit in which Thackeray has painted us his wonderful Becky Sharpe--the broad, half-smiling approval of the more modern satirist, with the ferocity of hate of his great predecessor. Not only does Mr. Meredith admire the woman’s genius for intrigue, but he brings sympathy and affection to the task of making her intelligible to us. So far from seeking to make her odious to us, as Thackeray deliberately does in the portrayal of Rebecca, he leaves it impossible for us to judge her more harshly than he himself does. Wherever she is, we know that we cannot be dull, and we are amused and captivated enough to be willing to dispense with the chill atmosphere of perfect morality and candour. He does not pursue her with a relentless exposure of her inmost vices. He preaches no moral after the fashion of the English novelist, and he takes his intriguing heroine as he finds her--an excellent study in which he delights. She is no vulgar hypocrite, like Becky, under the mask of a fine lady. Born in the sphere to which she feels she justly belongs, she would simply have been a great lady with uncommon diplomatic abilities and with a genius in the shading and splitting of social niceties. Forced to play the part of adventuress, she plays it grandly, and never shabbily. All her marvellous capacities are directed to the concealment of the family shame and to the maintaining of her sisters and brother in the eminence to which they have risen. She is a generous schemer, for her family are included in her enormous ambition. It is not for herself individually, but for the family of the Harringtons, for their united glory and stable position that she so unweariedly plots and intrigues and lies. The three daughters of the great tailor have respectively married a major, a wealthy brewer, and a Portuguese count. Caroline, the beauty, is unhappy as the major’s wife, and finally reaches the climax in exaltation by making the conquest of a duke. Evan now becomes the hope of the family, and it is on his fortunes, his efforts to appear a gentleman, seconded by his sister’s (the countess’s) efforts to penetrate into English aristocratic society, and secure an heiress for her brother, that the story runs.