If this is compassionate treatment of the fools, we wonder what Mr. Meredith would be likely to regard as severe handling of the genus. Indeed, Algernon Blancove, as the typical brainless young English gentleman, of no morals and less manners, runs in several varied editions throughout the author’s works. We come upon him under different names, sometimes more of a boor, as in the case of Harry Jocelyn; sometimes more of a gentleman, as in the person of Ferdinand Laxley, but ever drawn from the same persistently objectionable type. His older men, like Major Waring and Seymour Austen, he touches with a truly remarkable kindliness; a gentle sadness and reasonableness pervade the atmosphere in which he steeps their picture, and such is their humane influence upon him, that he drops, or nearly drops, metaphor, and adopts the language of commonplace but cultivated humanity. If, as has been said by M. Taine, George Sand makes us wish to be in love and the English novelists aim to make us wish to be married, Mr. Meredith may be accused of a desire to prove to us that in men middle-age is more attractive and lovable than youth, and that the sedate sadness that accompanies it but adds to the dignity of life, its thoughtful measure never exceeding a refined and placid geniality, and knowing no other discord than a very mild sense of disapprobation. In his men of this period, and even beyond it, he indeed portrays us thorough gentlemen, patient and honourable men of dignified habits of life and of keenly alert wits. Sometimes they have just a flavour of fire and brimstone unconsumed in an anterior stage, as in the case of Beauchamp’s delightful uncle. He is a sort of twelfth-century baron pleasantly masquerading as a nineteenth-century country gentleman, and more than one romantic young person would be indisposed to hesitate upon the side of youth, if ordered to make her choice between this elderly gentleman and his fiery nephew. Nearly on the first page he enchants us with the honest wholesomeness and vigour of his talk, when, in reply to something Beauchamp has said, he exclaims: ‘Damned fine speech! Now you get out of that trick of prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir, it’s all to your own nose! You’re talking to me, not to a gallery. Cæsar wraps his head in his robe; he gets his dig in the ribs for all his attitudinizing. It’s very well for a man to talk like that who owns no more than his bare bodkin life. Tall talk’s his jewellery; he must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better. Property and titles are worth having, whether you are worthy of them or a disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your fore-foot back more than enough.’