wise inadequately, but rather, if anything, somewhat beyond the requirements of her dramatic function--will reveal her, not, indeed, a personage of heroic proportions and qualities, but a young woman of considerable naturalness, plausibility, and realistic convincingness. The trouble has probably been that the critics of Beaumelle have passed hastily over the very scurrilous prose scene in which she first appears. They have looked on this passage as merely a piece of Fieldian low-comedy, a coarse bit of buffoonery which pretends to no function save that of humor, and can sustain not even this pretense. Nothing can be further from the truth. The passage _is_ a piece of coarse comedy such as Field had an over-fondness for writing; but it is something more; in reality, a proper understanding of the heroine is conditioned upon it. Beaumelle is a young girl whose mother, we may infer, has long been dead. The cares of the bench have been too great to allow her father time for much personal supervision of her; she has had for associates her two maids, and of these she not unnaturally finds the gay and witty, but thoroughly depraved, Bellapert the more congenial, and adopts her as her mentor and confidant. She is in love, after a fashion--caught, like the impressionable, uncritical girl she is, by the fair exterior of a young magnificent, whose elegant dress and courtly show of devotion quite blind her to his real worthlessness--and there is scant likelihood of her getting the man who has charmed her fancy. Her disposition is high-spirited and wayward, but not deliberately vicious; she has certain hazily defined ideals, mingled with the same romantic mist through which the superfine dandy, Novall, appears in her eyes a very Prince Charming: she “would meet love and marriage both at once”; she desires to preserve her honor. She has ideals, but she doubts their tangibility; she is in an unsettled state of mind, questioning the fundamentals of conduct and social relationships, in much need of good counsel. In that perilous mood she talks with Bellapert--Bellapert, the dearest cabinet of her secrets--Bellapert, the bribed instrument of Novall--and is told by that worldly-wise wench that marriage almost never unites with love, but must be used as a cloak for it; that honor is a foolish fancy; that a husband is a master to be outwitted and despised. The shaft sinks home all too surely; a visit at that very moment by Beaumelle’s lover completes the conquest, when her father interrupts their tete-a-tete--her father, who comes with the anouncement that she must marry a man whom she does not even know! In the scene where the destined bride and groom are brought face to face, she stands throughout in stony silence quite as eloquent as the more famous speechlessness of Charalois at the beginning of the play. She has ever been “handmaid” to her father’s will; she realizes all her hopes and fortunes “have reference to his liking;” and now she obeys, with