Then there is the granted desire; as if mother Fate hearing her children beg for poisoned candy said, Well, take it then, and see how you like it. Lady Mason, in _Orley Farm_, Mrs. Transome, Sir Richard Feverel, are all devoted parents who are allowed to have their own way in plans for their children, and merely asked to abide by the consequences. The death of Raffles comes most opportunely for Mr. Bulstrode, and seals his doom. The irony of the lost opportunity is hard to distinguish from just retribution. Philip Beaufort, killed on his way to a belated deed of duty to his family; Trollope’s Claverings and Bertrams; Godfrey Cass, Lord Fleetwood, Edward Blancove, all are made to feel the ironic undercurrent of that water the mill will never grind with, because it has passed. In addition to these _exempla_, attention might be called to a trio of ironic titles: _Great Expectations_, _Beauchamp’s Career_, and _One of Our Conquerers_. Though all the novelists indulge at times in the use of irony, Meredith alone offers a definition. In one place in the _Essay on Comedy_, he characterizes it as the honeyed sting which leaves the victim in doubt as to having been hurt. In another, he expands the idea: “Irony is the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of ambiguity.” Some there are who are not quite guiltless of these failures, but Meredith is not one of them. He is unique also, except for the corroboration of George Eliot, in making the ironic interpretation of life in itself an object of satire, in so far as it is brought forward as an excuse for our deficiencies, for then it betrays a certain weakness in our mental processes. For this he has one direct spokesman and two or three dramatic examples. The former is the incisive Redworth, who is exasperated at this vicarious refuge claimed by needy human nature.[241] “‘Upon my word,’ he burst out, ‘I should like to write a book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are they? Nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence, * * * It’s the seed we sow, individually or collectively.’” Chief of the latter--the dramatic examples--is a youth who, just returning from his father’s funeral, with bitter prospects ahead, encounters a being more wretched than himself, a forsaken young woman shelterless, and desperately ill.[242]