Even the little sister, who becomes a living mother to the Philip of the dead lady, cannot flee from this great tide of irony, which catches her and stands up to her heart. The author is constantly deprecating her love for Philip; though he knows it is the sweet flower of her life that is fed from the ugly soil of her betrayal. Why will she go on so with that boy, and save up money for him, and extemporize little treats with brandy and water _ad libitum_, and believe in him when he tries to become a bad magazine writer, and believe in his fortune when he marries a beggar, and, in short, believe that she was sent into the world to be deceived, and then have a great, blundering, brave, pure, splendid Philip, as if by bequest from a legal mother? Why in Heaven's name does she not blow upon the doctor, and make a good thing out of betraying his contemptible meanness? Gracious goodness! why is she so expensively magnanimous? Would you, Madame, be so extravagant as to pinch yourself in that way to be faithful and tender to a seducer out of faith and tenderness for his wife's boy? But, there he is: God set such a pure amen to a hideous deed, and she is the woman to say, Amen, after him; for God is just and watches the index of the balance. What! shall she compete with God for retribution? So her life is a long sacrifice to the purest and most mute devotion, and our author banters her to keep the tears from obscuring the page at which he writes. This charming insinuation of the great observer, who once said of himself that he had no head above his eyes, proves to us that he had a mighty truly-beating heart below them; and we reverently accept the little mother from his shaping hands, to place her in our Valhalla of Women, where Portia, Imogen, and Cordelia have long languished for her company. If irony does not forget good nature in its indignation at discovered shams, it can impart the exhilaration of wit. In a late novel, entitled the "Maid of Sker," there is a fishmonger who says that, "when the eyes of a fish begin to fail him through long retirement from the water," he has means of setting up their aspect; "and I called" my patrons "generous gentlemen and Christian-minded ladies every time they wanted to smell my fish, which is not right before payment. What right has another man to disparage the property of another? When you have bought him, he is your own; but, when he is put in the scales, remember 'nothing but good of the dead,' if you remember any thing." This recalls Hamlet's irony, when he said that he knew Polonius excellent well,--he was a fishmonger! "Not I, my lord." "Then I would you were so honest a man." Poor, stale Polonius! He was not as fresh as the fish which Shakspeare used to scent at Billingsgate, and knavery in the wind besides.