Thackeray is included in this list chiefly on the strength of the Osbornes, Pitt Crawley, and to a less degree, Blanche Armory and Mrs. Bute. Of the first he says, regarding certain declarations of disinterested friendliness and admiration,--“There is little doubt that old Osborne believed all he said, and that the girls were quite in earnest in their protestations of affection for Miss Swartz.” And his thrust at the hoodwinked Pitt’s delighted apprehension that the clever Becky really understood and appreciated him, is a palpable hit. He also arraigns under this head his favorite satirical object,--“the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.” On the other hand, more than any other novelist, he has given us sentimentalists unaware; that is, in such characters as Helen, Laura, and Arthur Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, and Colonel Newcome, he shares their own unawareness of the possession of this foible, though in all these it is of an innocent variety. George Eliot is keenly alive to this blindness in human nature, particularly as it manifests itself in the pernicious optimism of weak and wilful youth; but as with other mortal failures, it is usually too serious in her eyes for satire. Of all her novels, _Felix Holt_ and _Daniel Deronda_ alone have no character of this type. In the others he appears as Arthur Donnithorne, Stephen Guest, Godfrey Cass, Tito Melema, and Fred Vincy; but rarely is he ridiculed, and then ironically. Of the bonny young Squire Donnithorne she draws the portrait as he himself would see it:[386] “* * * candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind--impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. ‘No! I’m a devil of a fellow for getting myself into a hobble, but I always take care the load shall fall on my own shoulders.’ Unhappily there is no inherent poetic justice in hobbles, and they will sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst consequences on the prime offender, in spite of his loudly-expressed wish. It was entirely owing to this deficiency in the scheme of things that Arthur had ever brought any one into trouble besides himself.” Even when troublesome consequences threatened both himself and others, he was buoyed up by “a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly.” Tito Melema also leaned heavily on the law of compensation:[387] “It was not difficult for him to smile pleadingly on those whom he had injured, and offer to do them much kindness: and no quickness of intellect could tell him exactly the taste of that honey on the lips of the injured.”