On the whole, Mr. Meredith is hard on his own sex. Sometimes he draws a young fool like Lord Palmet in ‘Beauchamp’s Career,’ who can be a lord, a fool, and a gentleman at the same time; who makes us laugh and holds our sympathies, there is something so extremely natural in his idiocy and something so very engaging in his candour; and then we feel that the author is not hard on him, and has no desire to excite our contempt. But this tenderness to young men of gentle birth is rare in Mr. Meredith’s volumes. His laughter at them is not usually soft-hearted, but grim, as in the case of the youth who bought cigars to save himself from excesses in charity, and who, after an ill-digested dinner and wine, sat so long without moving a leg that he indulged in the belief that he had reflected profoundly, and woke up with the philosophic intent to forget himself; being under some doom, nobody caring for him, happiness unknown to him, born under a bad star, and ‘following his youthful wisdom, the wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.’ As an apology for his somewhat merciless dissection of fools like these young men, Mr. Meredith adds: ‘One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them; and the fool, though nature is wise, is next door to nature. He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling on him is that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent, now and then, in a veracious narration. There comes an hour when the veil drops on him, he not being always clean to the discreeter touch.’ And so he diligently leads us through the unshadowy mental recesses of the fool in question, as a sample of others abounding, not compassionately by any means, with perhaps too pointed a suggestion of sneer on the tip of his caustic pen. He shows him awaking to the conviction that England is no place for him to dwell in--a conviction we cordially share, with the consciousness that England alone could have produced him--with visions of himself married to a wife who in the colonies would make butter or cheese while he rode on horseback through space; saw himself rejoicing her with a declaration of love, astounding her with a proposition of marriage, and in little more than a week sailing on the high seas, newborn; ‘nothing of civilization about him, save a few last very first-rate cigars, which he projected to smoke on the poop of the vessel, and so dream of the world he left behind.’