But Mr. Meredith does not wish us to laugh unrestrainedly, and so he presents us with a figure of exquisite unblemished pathos in Harry’s sweet Aunt Dorothy, a lady we can never remember without an odd sensation about the throat. The glamour of purity that makes no parade of coldness, of divine unselfishness, of uncomplaining, scarcely-felt suffering envelopes her like a veil of glory, through which we rather define than perfectly see her. She passes through the book a beautiful ghost of pale womanhood, shedding beneficent rays upon her path. As a girl, finding her lover beloved of a weaker sister, she pleads with him for her, and makes an altar of her happiness for the younger one. When the sister dies, after unhappy wedded experiences, leaving a little boy, Dorothy is the boy’s mother and the father’s secret benefactor. She never marries, and all her money is devoted to the anonymous discharge of the arch-impostor’s debts, which, in this spurious offshoot of royalty, we may imagine were royal enough. The scene in which this fact is revealed is, for fiction, of superhuman strength--not the restrained sense of modern art, but the battle-axe strength of mediæval times. Harry marries the squire’s heiress, his cousin Janet, and deserves repose for the rest of his days. Mr. Meredith has written one dull book. ‘Beauchamp’s Career’ would be almost unreadable, other than patiently read as an exhaustive political treatise, if it were not for Mr. Romfrey and the face of Renée, that brings the soft radiancy of a dream to bear upon its intolerable dulness. Would not this charming description make amends for much? ‘A brunette of the fine lineaments of the good blood of France. She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the gondoliers; she was like a delicate cup of crystal brimming with the beauty of the place.... Her features had the soft irregularities which run to rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes, brows, nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly; thought flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought followed: her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French.’