self-forgetting, all-purifying
feeling for his little evil spirit than many a better man has for a good
woman. We do grudge Becky _a heart_, though it belong only to a
swindler. Poor, sinned against, vile, degraded, but still true-hearted
Rawdon!--you stand next in our affections and sympathies to honest
Dobbin himself. It was the instinct of a good nature which made the
Major feel that the stamp of the Evil One was upon Becky; and it was the
stupidity of a good nature which made the Colonel never suspect it. He
was a cheat, a black-leg, an unprincipled dog; but still "Rawdon _is_ a
man, and be hanged to him," as the Rector says. We follow him through
the illustrations, which are, in many instances, a delightful
enhancement to the text--as he stands there, with his gentle eyelid,
coarse moustache, and foolish chin, bringing up Becky's coffee-cup with
a kind of dumb fidelity; or looking down at little Rawdon with a more
than paternal tenderness. All Amelia's philoprogenitive idolatries do
not touch us like one fond instinct of "stupid Rawdon."

Dobbin sheds a halo over all the long-necked, loose-jointed,
Scotch-looking gentlemen of our acquaintance. Flat feet and flap ears
seem henceforth incompatible with evil. He reminds us of one of the
sweetest creations that have appeared from any modern pen--that plain,
awkward, loveable "Long Walter," in Lady Georgina Fullerton's beautiful
novel of "Grantley Manor." Like him, too, in his proper self-respect; for
Dobbin--lumbering, heavy, shy, and absurdly over modest as the ugly fellow
is--is yet true to himself. At one time he seems to be sinking into the
mere abject dangler after Amelia; but he breaks his chains like a man, and
resumes them again like a man, too, although half disenchanted of his
amiable delusion.

But to return for a moment to Becky. The only criticism we would offer
is one which the author has almost disarmed by making her mother a
Frenchwoman. The construction of this little clever monster is
diabolically French. Such a _lusus naturae_ as a woman without a heart
and conscience would, in England, be a mere brutal savage, and poison
half a village. France is the land for the real Syren, with the woman's
face and the dragon's claws. The genus of Pigeon and Laffarge claims it
for its own--only that our heroine takes a far higher class by not
requiring the vulgar matter of fact of crime to develop her full powers.
It is an affront to Becky's tactics to believe th