An inability to judge the character of others was his great weakness--a weakness which he himself realized, for he called upon Beaumont to confirm the one strikingly sure, true appraisement which he exhibited, his admiration for Charalois. Characteristically, this weakness seems to have taken the form of a too-generous estimate of his fellows. This caused him to bestow his vacated office upon the harsh and unjust Novall, and to be blind to the disposition of his daughter, and the danger that lay in her intimacy with Novall Junior. But if his kindly nature saw the better side of even that contemptible young man, he at least understood him well enough not to take him at all seriously as a suitor for Beaumelle’s hand. Of the Novalls, father and son, there is a much briefer presentation. Yet even so, in the case of old Novall we have as masterly a sketch as in Romont a detailed study. His every word is eloquent of his stern, not to say _mean_, nature--curt and severe towards others, all prejudice where he himself is concerned, inexorably malevolent against those who incur his animosity. Yet it never enters his head to seek the satisfaction of his hate in any way save through the law; for example, he does not seize upon, or even think seriously of, Pontalier’s proffer of private vengeance; the law is his sphere--he will abuse it to his advantage, if he can, but he will not go outside of it. He is, in other words, the Official Bureaucrat _par excellence_, and his enmity against the martial house of the Charaloises and the rigor with which he is said to “cross every deserved soldier and scholar,” and, on the other hand, the detestation in which Romont holds him, are manifestations of the feud of type against type. It has been suggested that the especial fervor with which he is devoted to execration argues a prototype in actual life, and that in him is to be recognized Sir Edward Coke, notorious for the savage vindictiveness of his conduct towards Sir Walter Raleigh. Novall Junior, the cowardly, foppish, and unscrupulous gallant, though a flimsy personality, affords once or twice, in the Fieldian prose, rather good humor: e. g.-- _Nay, o’ my soul, ’tis so; what fouler object in the world, than to see a young, fair, handsome beauty unhandsomely dighted, and incongruently accoutred? or a hopeful chevalier unmethodically appointed in the external ornaments of nature? For, even as the index tells us the contents of stories, and directs to the particular chapters, even so does the outward habit and superficial order of garments (in man or woman) give us a taste of the spirit, and demonstratively point (as it were a manual note from the margin) all the internal quality and habiliment of the soul; and there cannot be a more evident, palpable, gross manifestation of poor, degenerate, dunghilly blood and breeding, than a rude, unpolished, disordered, and slovenly outside._ (IV, i, 48-60.)