that a mother's solicitude for her
daughter should admit of no such juxtaposition. But the criticism has
come, I think, from those who have failed to understand, not from those
who have understood, the tale;--not because they have read it, but
because they have not read it, and have only looked at it or heard of
it. Lady Castlewood is perhaps ten years older than the boy Esmond, whom
she first finds in her husband's house, and takes as a protege; and from
the moment in which she finds that he is in love with her own daughter,
she does her best to bring about a marriage between them. Her husband is
alive, and though he is a drunken brute,--after the manner of lords of
that time,--she is thoroughly loyal to him. The little touches, of which
the woman is herself altogether unconscious, that gradually turn a love
for the boy into a love for the man, are told so delicately, that it is
only at last that the reader perceives what has in truth happened to the
woman. She is angry with him, grateful to him, careful over him,
gradually conscious of all his worth, and of all that he does to her and
hers, till at last her heart is unable to resist. But then she is a
widow;--and Beatrix has declared that her ambition will not allow her to
marry so humble a swain, and Esmond has become,--as he says of himself
when he calls himself "an old gentleman,"--"the guardian of all the
family," "fit to be the grandfather of you all."

The character of Lady Castlewood has required more delicacy in its
manipulation than perhaps any other which Thackeray has drawn. There is
a mixture in it of self-negation and of jealousy, of gratefulness of
heart and of the weary thoughtfulness of age, of occasional
sprightliness with deep melancholy, of injustice with a thorough
appreciation of the good around her, of personal weakness,--as shown
always in her intercourse with her children, and of personal
strength,--as displayed when she vindicates the position of her kinsman
Henry to the Duke of Hamilton, who is about to marry Beatrix;--a mixture
which has required a master's hand to trace. These contradictions are
essentially feminine. Perhaps it must be confessed that in the
unreasonableness of the woman, the author has intended to bear more
harshly on the sex than it deserves. But a true woman will forgive him,
because of the truth of Lady Castlewood's heart. Her husband had been
killed in a duel, and there were circumstances which had induced her at
the m