“‘I’ll tell you what, Dan,’ said Sir Hugo, ‘a man who sets his face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered impracticable fellow. There’s a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style--one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible.’” This is recognized also by Lytton, who quotes “an anonymous writer of 1722:”[363] “Deceit is the strong but subtile chain which runs through all the members of a society, and links them together; trick or be tricked, is the alternative; ’tis the way of the world, and without it intercourse would drop.” Trollope subscribes with qualification, by having the archdeacon say, on the death of Mrs. Proudie,--[364] “The proverb of _De Mortuis_ is founded on humbug. Humbug out of doors is necessary.” At the extreme opposite from the hypocrites, shrewd, knowing, wise at least in their own conceit, stand the incompetent, victims of folly; satirized not for ignorance but for bland unconsciousness of it, usually accompanied by a hallucination of efficiency. As the hypocrites shade off into villains, to be rebuked without humor, such as Jasper Losely, Randal Leslie, Bill Sykes, Sedgett, so the fools merge into the artless, to be smiled at without rebuke, as Colonel Digby and Colonel Newcome, Frank Hazeldean, the Vardens, Tom Pinch, Captain Cuttle, and “poor, excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and a toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one.” It is Dickens again who contributes the most data to this study, and particularly to the genus, Silly Dame. Here his amusement over mere fatuous complacency becomes warmed into scorn when that stupidity affects the home she has in charge, and lowers into a failure the very thing that it is most important to raise into success,--such success not being automatic. Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Wilfer, Mrs. Finching, like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Palmer, and Susan Ferrier’s Lady Juliana Douglass, are comparatively harmless, and are indulged accordingly. But an incapacity that may be picturesque in easy circumstances deepens into a grave misdemeanor when joined to a small income. Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Pocket, Mrs. Pardiggle, and especially Mrs. Jellyby are domestic pests, at whom we are more exasperated than amused.