Pericles adds to the liveliness, and also one Lady Something, who is almost in love with Wilfred, and plays an ugly trick on him and on Emilia by getting him to declare his passion for her and his indifference to Emilia within the latter’s hearing. The curtain drops on the degradation of the gallant cornet and the sorrowful enlightenment of Emilia. There is also a tragic figure of an organist and impoverished baronet, who loves one of the ladies of the Pole establishment, and commits suicide because she, loving him, must marry for her family, and several lively social youths and maidens and matrons, who act chorus, wittily, epigrammatically, and sprightlily, as Mr. Meredith’s chorus ever does. Then there are Italian politics--a favourite theme with the writer--an attractive Welsh brother and sister, and several unforgettable love-scenes; notably, one great passionate love-scene at Wilming Weir by moonlight, worthy to rank with those matchless chapters in ‘Richard Feverel.’ The lover himself is weaker and more pitiable than the average young gentleman elected by the novelist to pipe fluted sentimentalities to the sweet thrilling note of the heroine; a man--or a make-believe of man, which is by far the commoner article, for true and real men are rarer than true and real women, rare as these be--who could doubt the delicacy of Sandra’s passionate cry, ‘My lover!’ and who ‘could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.’ Writers are sometimes compunctious for the abasement to which they have submitted their heroines, and spare them the wedding-ring. Sandra does not marry Wilfred, and we hear of ‘the mellowed depth, the soft human warmth, which marriage had lent to her voice,’ afterwards in Italy. I forget whom she married, but I daresay it was her Welsh lover, the noble Italian enthusiast, blessed with a noble sister.