Now, the heroine is quite another matter, as Mr. Meredith, following great examples, shows us. She must claim our sympathy, our love, and our admiration. She must be surpassingly fair, and no less lovely of mind and soul. We are to quit her enamoured and regretful, vividly aware of her attractions, both mental and physical. And this has Mr. Meredith achieved in the case of all his heroines--maidens and widows. They are beautiful, witty, pure, womanly, and most captivating. Each one holds us enslaved as we follow her fortunes. She has but to open her lips, and we are at her feet. In spite of his harshnesses, Mr. Meredith remains great by his generous sympathy with the weak. In the strife between men and women, a strife he never blinks away, or feigns to discredit because his men choose to fall in love with his women, he ranges himself upon the side of women always and inevitably--and what a defence in the ranks of the enemy! He brings no drivelling, one-sided sympathy to bear upon the subject, but clear, logical sense and a keen eye for the weaknesses of the sex he defends. He laughs at woman sometimes, and enjoys a witticism and a taste of cruelty at her expense. But he makes it understood that his laughter is not scoffing and his cruelty is not bitter. On the contrary, they but add flavour to his championship, and make us the prouder of the big blows he directs against her tyrant. The tyranny of his own sex he doubts as little as its selfishness, which he has immortalized past cool endurance for man in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne. The conventional woman, all horrors and shivers at the aspect of the natural and undecorated, made up of drawing-room theories and lap-dog sentiments, he rejects as unworthy of that which he conceives woman might be, if relieved from the sentimental trammels and restrictions that the selfish grossness of man has imposed upon her. He believes that women would be all the better for living more as men do, and men for meeting them half-way--one sex modified by the other, and mutually ennobled; eating healthily in acknowledgment of all healthy appetites, as opposed to the coarse Byronic view that condemns them to live upon air and the sentiments. Sandra talks freely of potatoes, fine ones too, while her sentimental lover writhes and shivers, feeling pelted by those potatoes, and the founts of love are nearly dried at the root of his heart. Can a young gentleman with a proper respect for himself feel romantically disposed towards a young woman, even if she be divinely beautiful, when she owns to a capacity to dine off potatoes? or ascend to heaven on an aria when the prima-donna refreshes herself with bottled stout? For such types, frequent enough, he suggests that sunlight must be too strong and gross, and wonders why they have not set their wits to invent some soft extract of a shadowy illumination wherewith to diminish the terrors and uglinesses of mere nature.