"Mrs. Gore has a perfectly feminine knowledge of all the weaknesses and absurdities of an ordinary man of fashion, following the routine of London life in the season. She unmasks his selfishness with admirable acuteness; she exposes his unromantic egotism, with delightful sauciness. Her portraits of women are also executed with great spirit; but not with the same truth. In transferring men to her canvas, she has relied upon the faculty of observation, usually fine and vigilant in a woman; but when portraying her own sex, the authoress has perhaps looked within; and the study of the internal operations of the human machine is a far more complex affair, and requires far more extensive experience, and also different faculties, from those necessary to acquire a perfect knowledge of the appearances on the surface of humanity." Notwithstanding Mrs. Gore touches so lightly on the surface of life, certain definite sociological and moral principles underlie her work. She is as democratic as Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Mitford, or even William Godwin. She asserts again and again that men of inferior birth with the same opportunities of education may be as intellectual and refined as the sons of a "hundred earls." Those members of the aristocracy who fail to recognise the true worth of intelligent men of plebeian origin are made very ridiculous. In her novel _Pin Money_, published in 1831, how very funny is Lady Derenzy's speech when she learns that a soap manufacturer is being fêted in fashionable society! Lady Derenzy, by the way, is the social law-giver to her little coterie: "It is now some years," said she, "since the independence of America, and the influence exerted in this country by the return of a large body of enlightened men, habituated to the demoralising spectacle of an equalisation of rank, was supposed to exert a pernicious influence on the minds of the secondary and inferior classes of Great Britain. At that critical moment I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Lord Derenzy took my advice, and the country was saved. "Again, when the assemblage of the States General of France,--the fatal tocsin of the revolution,--spread consternation and horror throughout the higher ranks of every European country, and the very name of the guillotine operated like a spell on the British peerage, I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Again Lord Derenzy took my advice, and again the country was saved."