ttempt
to represent people as agreeable and interesting, but she knowingly
forces _dis_agreeable people on us, and insists that we shall be
interested in their story by the skill with which it is told. Mr. Amos
Barton, for instance, is as uninteresting a person as can well be
imagined: a dull, obtuse curate, whose poverty gives him no fair claim
to pity; for he has entered the ministry of the English Church without
any particular conviction of its superiority to other religious bodies;
without any special fitness for its ministry; without anything of the
ability which might reasonably entitle him to expect to rise; and
without the private means which are necessary for the support of most
married men in a profession which, if it is not (as it is sometimes
called) a lottery, has very great inequalities of income, and to the
vast majority of those who follow it gives very little indeed. Mr.
Barton is not a gentleman--a defect which the farmers and tradespeople
of his parish are not slow to discover, and for which they despise him.
He is without any misgivings as to himself or suspicion of his
deficiencies in any way, and his conduct is correctly described in a
lisping speech of the "secondary squire" of his parish, "What an ath
Barton makth of himthelf!" Yet for this stupid man our sympathy is
bespoken, merely because he has a wife so much too good for him that we
are almost inclined to be angry with her for her devotion to him.

Tina is an undisciplined, abnormal little creature, without good looks
or any attractive quality except a talent for music, and with a temper
capable of the most furious excesses. Although Janet is described as
handsome, amiable, and cultivated, all these good properties are
overwhelmed in our thoughts of her by the degrading vice of which she is
to be cured; while her prophet, Mr. Tryan, although very zealous in his
work, is avowedly a narrow Calvinist, wanting in intellectual culture,
very irritable, not a little bitter and uncharitable, excessively fond
of applause without being very critical as to the quarter from which it
comes, and strongly possessed with the love of domination. Tom Tulliver
is hard, close, unimaginative, self-confident, repelling, with a stern
rectitude of a certain kind, but with no understanding of or toleration
for any character different from his own. Philip Wakem is a personage as
little pleasant as picturesque. Maggie, as a child--although in her
father's opinion "too