argue this out. But, for my part, I say as a
reader to _Cleveland_, "No more _in_ thee my steps shall be, For ever
and for ever."[341]

[Sidenote: _Le Doyen de Killerine._]

_Le Doyen de Killerine_ is not perhaps so utterly to be excommunicated
as _Cleveland_, and, as has been said above, some have found real
interest in it. It is not, however, free either from the
preposterousness or from the dulness of the earlier book, though the
first characteristic is less preposterous as such preposterousness goes.
The Dean of Killerine (Coleraine) is a Roman Catholic dean, just after
the expulsion of James II., when, we learn with some surprise, that
neighbourhood was rather specially full of his co-religionists. He is a
sort of _lusus naturae_, being bow-legged, humpbacked, potbellied, and
possessing warts on his brows, which make him a sort of later horned
Moses. The eccentricity of his appearance is equalled by that of his
conduct. He is the eldest son of an Irish gentleman (nobleman, it would
sometimes seem), and his father finds a pretty girl who is somehow
willing to marry him. But, feeling no vocation for marriage, he suggests
to her (a suggestion perhaps unique in fiction if not in fact) that she
should marry his father instead. This singular match comes off, and a
second family results, the members of which are, fortunately, not _lusus
naturae_, but a brace of very handsome and accomplished boys, George and
Patrick, and an extremely pretty girl, Rosa. Of these three, their
parents dying when they are something short of full age, the excellent
dean becomes a sort of guardian. He takes them to the exiled court of
Versailles, and his very hen-like anxieties over the escapades of these
most lively ducklings supply the main subject of the book. It might have
been made amusing by humorous treatment, but Prevost had no humour in
him: and it might have been made thrilling by passion, but he never,
except in the one great little instance, compressed or distilled his
heaps and floods of sensibility and sensationalism into that. The scene
where a wicked Mme. de S---- plays, and almost outplays, Potiphar's wife
to the good but hideous Dean's Joseph is one of the most curious in
novel-literature, though one of the least amusing.

[Sidenote: The _Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_.]

We may now go back to the _Memoires_, partly in compliment to the master
of all mid-nineteenth-century critics, but more because of their almost
fortui