remark is entirely true of nearly everything in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and
of three-fourths of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but to _Ravenshoe_
it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels
scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects
him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the
exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.

Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from
the world and brood for many years, and on quite insufficient grounds,
in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to
poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain
his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma
Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is
employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can
triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is
wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it
would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as
she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the
beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the
hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.' It
is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar
as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her
brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.

The beautiful, crazy Gerty Neville is another instance of perversion.
Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust
the _blase_ aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more
inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the
Bush' employed to attract the attention of a colonial acquaintance of
hers in Rotten Row.

But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the
caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in
a story rich in noble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty,
audacious nonsense, and containing such real personages as Jim Burton
and his father and mother, Erne Hillyar, and the Honourable Jack Dawson.

Even in _Silcote of Silcotes_ there are intermittent glimpses of
finely-conceived character which almost outbalance the eccentricities of
the Dark Squire and his sister, the fantastic meddler in