d then the smaller--some of them, ethically, very small--women; Lady
Wynnstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thornburgh; above all, Robert's delightful
Irish mother, and Mrs. Darcy; how excellent they are! Mrs. Darcy we
seem to have known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced to catch sight
of her capital letter on the page, as we read on. In truth, if a high
and ideal purpose, really learned in the school of Wordsworth and among
the Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward describes so sympathetically,
with fitting dignity and truth of style, has accompanied the author
throughout; no less plain, perhaps more pleasing to some readers, is
the quiet humour which never fails her, and tests, while it relieves,
the sincerity of her more serious thinking:--

"At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back
with little, short, [61] scudding steps, to implore them all to come to
tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special
hobby, and in her last new summer-house.

"'I build two or three every summer,' she said; 'now there are
twenty-one! Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness
in the little eerie face; 'but how can one live without hobbies?
That's one--then I've two more. My album--oh, you will all write in my
album, won't you? When I was young--when I was Maid of Honour'--and
she drew herself up slightly--'everybody had albums. Even the dear
Queen herself! I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it;
something quite stupid, after all. Those hobbies--the garden and the
album--are quite harmless, aren't they? They hurt nobody, do they?'
Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in
it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked."

Mrs. Ward's women, as we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and
really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by
becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and
dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very
genii of isolation and division. It is depressing to see so really
noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time
goes on, from the happy resignation of the first volume (in which
solemn, beautiful, and entire, and so very real, she is like a poem of
Wordsworth) down to the mere passivity of the third volume, and the
closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, very exquisitely as this
episode of unbelieving yet saintly biography has been