“‘I’ve been accustomed to it from my youth upwards,’ said Pen; and Strong had the grace not to laugh for five minutes, when he exploded into fits of hilarity which Pen has never, perhaps, understood up to this day.” In her preface to the second edition of _Jane Eyre_, Charlotte Brontë said that Thackeray resembled Fielding “as an eagle does a vulture;” and also compared the former to a Hebrew prophet. Putting aside the injustice to Fielding (happily atoned for by the author of _Middlemarch_, thereby restoring the average in feminine criticism) one is moved to reply that if any Victorian shoulders received the mantle of Elijah they were undoubtedly the firm-muscled ones of George Eliot. Hers is the union of native, smoldering wit and tremendous moral earnestness that marked the ancient Semitic race and reappeared in the modern Saxon. The downright seriousness which constitutes her main mood is tinctured but lightly with the ironic tone, but its pungency is well distributed. Its appearance is characterized by brevity and frequency. There are no long passages of sustained irony; and no very long ones wholly devoid of it. It usually occurs in quiet, unostentatious phrases, as in the description of the Raveloe philosophy, or of that superior family whose daughters bloomed into the Mesdames Deane, Glegg, Pullet, and Tulliver. The cogitative Mr. Glegg, for instance, had a truly scientific attitude toward the captious temper that enlivened his home,--[222] “* * * it is certain that an acquiescent mild wife would have left his meditations comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.” Mrs. Waule, on the other hand, was an acquiescent mild soul, and accepted domestic frankness as in the order of nature,--[223] “Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’s intentions about families.” From this banter we pass to a bitter sarcasm that covers a burning social sympathy in the account of the Florentine banquet, where none could eat the tough, expensive peacock, but all gloried in the extravagance of having it to play with,--[224] “And it would have been rashness to speak slightingly of peacock’s flesh, or any other venerable institution at a time when Fra Girolamo was teaching the disturbing doctrine that it was not the duty of the rich to be luxurious for the sake of the poor.” Irony is applied to two young men, with totally different purposes; in one case it is directed against the youth himself; in the other, against an anticipated criticism of his conduct. Fred Vincy belongs to the class of which Algernon Blancove is the most brilliant representative, and from which Evan Harrington made an early escape. He is persuaded that he “wouldn’t have been such a bad fellow if he had been rich.” But his destiny induces in him “a streak of misanthropic bitterness.”[225]