would
wince, one would think, at having opportunity to bestow its tolerance
upon his cook.

Between these two housewifely appearances, Mrs. Primrose potters through
the book; plots--always squalidly; talks the worst kinds of folly; takes
the lead, with a loud laugh, in insulting a former friend; crushes her
repentant daughter with reproaches that show envy rather than
indignation, and kisses that daughter with congratulation upon hearing
that she had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted a valid
marriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes common and unclean everything
she touches; has but two really gentle and tender moments all through the
story; and sets, once for all, the example in literature of the woman we
find thenceforth, in Thackeray, in Douglas Jerrold, in Dickens, and _un
peu partout_.

Hardly less unspiritual, in spite of their conventional romance of youth
and beauty, are the daughters of the squalid one. The author, in making
them simple, has not abstained from making them cunning. Their vanities
are well enough, but these women are not only vain, they are so envious
as to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law--one who is their rival in no
way except in so much as she is a contemporary beauty. "Miss Arabella
Wilmot," says the pious father and vicar, "was allowed by all (except my
two daughters) to be completely pretty."

They have been left by their father in such brutal ignorance as to be
instantly deceived into laughing at bad manners in error for humour. They
have no pretty or sensitive instincts. "The jests of the rich," says the
Vicar, referring to his own young daughters as audience, "are ever
successful." Olivia, when the squire played off a dullish joke, "mistook
it for humour. She thought him, therefore, a very fine gentleman." The
powders and patches for the country church, the ride thither on
Blackberry, in so strange a procession, the face-wash, the dreams and
omens, are all good gentle comedy; we are completely convinced of the
tedium of Mrs. Primrose's dreams, which she told every morning. But
there are other points of comedy that ought not to precede an author's
appeal to the kind of sentiment about to be touched by the tragic scenes
of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.

In odd sidling ways Goldsmith bethinks himself to give his principal
heroine a shadow of the virtues he has not bestowed upon her. When the
unhappy Williams, above-mentioned, has been used in vain by Olivia, and