see in him a monstrous image of ourselves, of all mankind, so that we are afraid to turn from him and wring hands with the wretch in a kind of shamed sympathy. We readily admit the pure comedy of this sublime absurdity in human form reduced to such shabby dimensions and exposed for the ridicule of posterity, but we cannot laugh very joyously at the exposure. There is too much truth in it for the comic muse, and the pathos is too apparent. As Sir Willoughby is Meredith’s typical analysis of the male’s character, so is Diana Warwick his chief type of woman, and just so ruthlessly as he is drawn is she drawn mercifully--too mercifully, perhaps, for she is painted in all the glowing colours of love. Mr. Meredith is not the analyzer of Diana; he is her ardent lover. He adores her unscrutinizingly, as it behoves the true lover to adore his lady. He paints her very faults upon worshipping knees, and does not think it necessary to apologize for her or urge one word of excuse or deprecation when, following fact, she stoops to a shabby breach of confidence worthy the lowest new journalist. She is Diana to him in all her moods, a bewildering and adorable creature, and as such he expects the reader to swallow her thankfully, rejoicing in her as he does, wondering at the stupidity and evilness of the world that condemns her, censuring the meanness of the recreant lover who deserts her upon discovery of her unexplainable betrayal of his confidences. If his lady chooses to start out at midnight, fresh from a love-scene in which she has learnt from her lover a great political secret, to sell it for a very substantial sum to a London editor, Mr. Meredith simply follows her as an admiring recorder, and finds it sufficient explanation to tell us pityingly that she was a child in this world’s affairs, that she was as ignorant as a child in business matters, and had no idea of the gravity of her action. This last plea we accept willingly, for impulsive women like Diana rarely have any notion of the weight of actions, and never can measure their consequences; but for a simpleton in worldly affairs she showed a pretty accurate knowledge of the value of her secret and of its market price, and for a lady to sell secret information learnt in a love-scene seems to us an unmistakable fall which, however much we may deplore, we hold ourselves exempt from admiring, or even condoning, as Diana’s apologist desires us to do.