is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic;
Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after
highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest
danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an
auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers
indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's
school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."

Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover
where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he
anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly
noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the
story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern
in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the
lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr.
Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business,
and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the
money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is
discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by
handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one
representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in
the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp
practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the
licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded
Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of
Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound
whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much
chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a
good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things
very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the
serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his
mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that
he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is
impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray
was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some
years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George
Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there ar