She declared that she never supported such things either by her name or her money; that, for her part, she was no politician; that she thought female patriots were absurd and odious; and that she was glad none of that description were of her acquaintance.

All this was plainly directed against Lady Bradstone, who was a zealous patriot; her Ladyship retorted, by some reflections equally keen, but rather more politely expressed, each party addressing their innuendoes to the bookseller, who, afraid to disoblige either the rich or the fashionable, preserved, as much as it was in the power of his muscles, a perfectly neutral countenance. At last, in order to relieve himself from his constraint, he betook himself to count the subscribers, and Miss Turnbull seized this moment to desire that her name might be added to the list. Lady Bradstone's eyes were immediately fixed upon her with complacency-Lady Stock's flashed fire. Regardless of their fire, Almeria coolly added, "Twelve copies, Sir, if you please."

"Twelve copies, Miss Turnbull, at a guinea a-piece! Lord bless me, do you know what you are about, my dear?" said Lady Stock.

"Perfectly well," replied our heroine; "I think twelve guineas, or twenty times that sum, would be well be. stowed in a certain independence of sentiment, which I understand is the object of this work."

A whisper from Lady Bradstone to one of the shop men of "Who is that charming woman?" gave our heroine courage to pronounce these words. Lady Stock, in great displeasure, walked to her carriage, saying, "you are to consider what you will do with your twelve copies, Miss Turnbull; for I am convinced your guardian will never let such a parcel of inflammatory trash into his house; he admires female patriotism and all that sort of thing, as little as I do."

The rudeness of this speech did not disconcert Almeria; for she was fortified by the consciousness that she had gained her point with Lady Bradstone. This lady piqued herself upon showing her preferences and aversions with

equal enthusiasm and éclat. She declared before a large company at dinner that notwithstanding Miss Turnbull was nobody by birth, she had made herself somebody by. spirit; and that for her part she should, contrary to her general principle, which she confessed was to keep a strong line of demarcation between nobility and mobility, take a pride in bringing forward merit even in the shape of a Yorkshire grazier's daughter.

Excellent too is the account of Almeria's impressions when she has quarrelled with Lady Stock, and become intimate with the greater lady -as to the contrast between the two:

Lady Bradstone invited Miss Turnbull to her house, feeling herself, as she said, bound in honor to bear her out in a dispute of which she had been the original occasion. In this lady's society Almeria found the style of dress, manners, and conversation, different from what she had seen at Lady Stock's; she had without difficulty imitated the affectation of Lady Stock, but there was an ease in the decided tone of Lady Bradstone which could not be so easily acquired. Having lived from her infancy in the best company, there was no heterogeneous mixture in her manners; and the consciousness of this gave an habitual air of security to her words, looks and motions. Lady Stock seemed forced to beg or buy-Lady Bradstone accustomed to command or levy, admiration as her rightful tribute. The pride of Lady Bradstone was uniformly resolute and successful; the insolence of Lady Stock, if it were opposed, became cowardly and ridiculous. Lady Bradstone seemed to have, on all occasions, an instinctive sense of what a person of fashion ought to do; Lady Stock, notwithstanding her bravadoing air, was frequently perplexed, and anxious, and therefore awkward: she had always recourse to precedent. said so, or Lady Qwore this or Lady H- was there, and therefore I am sure it was proper."

"Lady Pdid so. Lady G

On the contrary, Lady Bradstone

never quoted authorities, but presumed that she was a precedent for others. The one was eager to follow, the other determined to lead the fashion.

Our heroine, who was by no means deficient in penetration, and whose whole attention was now given to the study of externals, quickly perceived these shades of difference between her late and her present friend. She remarked, in particular, that she found herself much more at ease in Lady Bradstone's society. Her Ladyship's pride was not so offensive as Lady Stock's vanity: secure of her own superiority Lady Bradstone did not want to measure herself every instant with inferiors. She treated Almeria as her equal in every respect; and in setting her right in points of fashion never seemed to triumph, but to consider her own knowledge as a necessary consequence of the life she had led from her infancy. With a sort of proud generosity, she always considered those whom she honored with her friendship as thenceforward entitled to all the advantages of her own situation, and to all the respect due to a part of herself. She now always used the word we, with peculiar emphasis, in speaking of Miss Turnbull and herself. This was a signal perfectly well understood by her acquaintance. Almeria was received everywhere with the most distinguished attention; and she was delighted, and absolutely intoxicated, with her sudden rise in the world of fashion. She found that her former acquaintance of Lady Stock's were extremely ambitious of claiming an intimacy; but this could not be done. Miss Turnbull had not acquired, by practice, the power of looking at people without seeming to see them, and of forgetting those with whom she was perfectly well acquainted. Her opinion of her own consequence was much raised by the court that was paid to her by several young men of fashion, who thought it expedient to marry two hundred thousand pounds.

the royal cortège-for the first time shaking Almeria's faith in Lady Bradstone's unquestionable greatness; how Lady Pierrepoint supplies a new model for Almeria, that of the great lady at court "speaking always as if she thought that her words would be repeated and must lead to consequences"; how Lady Pierrepoint supplants the other first as Almeria's idol and then as her friend and patroness, must be read by those who may care to turn to Miss Edgeworth's story itself. Enough has been quoted to illustrate my thesis. The same qualities are throughout apparent-a novelist's absolute truthfulness in detail, in spite of a strained moral to the story as a whole, a moral which any one of fairly wide experience feels to be false to life's pervading anomalies.

I said I should not speak of Leonora at any length-and if I refer to it in concluding my remarks, it is only to invoke its testimony to the qualities of the writer, as justifying my estimate for critics whose verdict might otherwise be doubtful. Lady Olivia-the very modern English lady of a bad French school, reader of risqué German novels of the period, and of dangerous philosophy, whose whole romance of life consists in a succession of love affairs of doubtful (or rather not at all doubtful) morality-in order to pass the time and to arouse her friend Lady Leonora's jealousy, flirts with her husband, who is clearly not quite a novice in the lists of love. In the end the affair becomes far more serious than she intended.. She finds herself desperately in love with him and he becomes so with her. The nameless Duchess, Leonora's mother, when consulted at an earlier stage, was sure that no really serious dénouement would ensue if only Leonora showed no signs of jealousy. But she proves quite wrong. The apparent indifference of his wife indeed helps the

the days when our feelings lay nearer the surface, and when we lived with our favorite characters in fiction in a way that somehow seems to have become a lost art in our maturer years.

The other, and probably very much larger class of Dickens's lovers, are those who read him for his humor alone. I wish to call the attention of my courteous reader of this class to one phase, I might almost say one example, of that humor, namely, Dickens's use of the word "gentleman." It is peculiar to himself. It is the very embodiment and of the very essence of the spirit of his humor. Definition is very difficult, and never more difficult than in such a case as the present. I frankly confess that to set down in bald print and in definite language wherein consists the essentially Dickensian humor in the use of the word "gentleman" baffles me. The thing is too subtle and elusive. It evades grasp. One can only say, "Read him in his whimsical moods, and you cannot fail to feel what I mean." It is difficult to explain the ever-fresh joke in his use of the word, but the joke is none the less there, all the same, almost every time the word "gentleman" crops up. Perhaps the humor of it lies in contrast, the implied contrast between the nobleness of the word itself and the ignobleness of many who, with no shadow of right, lay claim to the title. It is on this contrast between pretension and reality, so often seen in real life, that Dickens almost unconsciously seizes, and holds up the poor sham to eternal ridicule. For instance, in one of the early chapters of Martin Chuzzleirit we have almost a dictionary definition of the Dickensian gentleman. The "gentleman" in this particular case is Mr. Montague Tigg, and he is introduced to the reader as follows:-"It happened then, and lastly, that Mr. Pecksniff found himself immediately

collared by something which smelt like several damp umbrellas, a barrel of beer, a cask of warm brandy and water, and a small parlor full of stale tobacco smoke, mixed: and . . . found himself standing opposite to, and in the grasp of, a perfectly strange gentleman of still stranger appearance, who with his disengaged hand rubbed his own head very hard, and looked at him, Pecksniff, with an evil countenance." Then follows the definition by the author himself of the typical Dickensian "gentleman":-"The gentleman was of that order of appearance which is currently termed shabby genteel . . . He was very dirty and very jaunty; very bold and very mean; very swaggering and very slinking; very much like a man who might have been something better, and unspeakably like a man who deserved to be something worse." "Pulling up one's shirt collar" seems to have been the approved mode of swaggering and looking big in the early years of the nineteenth century, though the operation is one of the mysteries which I have never been able to fathom. Very rich is the description of the impotent efforts of Mr. Tigg in this direction, in the ensuing interview, in the course of which he finds it to be to his interest to make peace with Mr. Pecksniff. "I am proud to know you, and I beg your pardon,' said the gentleman, touching his hat and subsequently diving behind his cravat for his shirt collar, which, however he did not succeed in bringing to the surface. 'Very

good,' remarked the gentleman With that he made another dive for his shirt collar, and brought up a string." This gentleman is not, to my thinking at least, nearly such an interesting personage when, later in the story, he reappears in fine clothes, and as one of the ordinary villains of the piece.

As another illustration of the skilful and humorous use made of the contrast between pretensions and reality,

take this scene from the Pickwick Papers.

Mr. Pickwick, ever ready to embrace an opportunity of studying human nature, allows himself to be introduced to a select club of gentlemen. "A profound silence, quite contrary to Mr. Pickwick's expectation, succeeded. 'You don't find this sort of thing disagreeable, I hope, sir?' said his righthand neighbor, a gentleman in a checked shirt and mosaic studs, with a cigar in his mouth. 'Not in the least,' replied Mr. Pickwick; 'I like it very much, although I am no smoker myself.' 'I should be very sorry to say I wasn't,' interposed another gentleman on the opposite side of the table. 'It's board and lodgings to me, is smoke.' Mr. Pickwick glanced at the speaker, and thought that if it were washing too, it would be all the better."

In the strange vicissitudes of fortune, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller find themselves within the walls of the Fleet Prison, and nothing could more aptly illustrate the Dickensian estimate of the Dickensian gentleman than the following passage of arms between Sam and one of the too numerous "gentlemen" denizens of the prison. "Mr. Smangle himself, who was already partially dressed, was seated on his bedstead, occupied in the desperately hopeless attempt of staring Mr. Weller out of countenance

'Well, will you know me again?' said Mr. Smangle with a frown. 'I'd svear to you anyvere's, sir,' replied Sam cheerfully. 'Don't be impertinent to a gentleman, sir,' said Mr. Smangle. 'Not on no account,' replied Sam. 'If you'll tell me w'en he wakes, I'll be upon the wery best extra-super behaviour! This observation, having a remote tendency to imply that Mr. Smangle was no gentleman, kindled his ire," &c., &c. The prison in fact is full of "gentlemen," or at least of the sorry pretentious ragamuf

fins to whom Dickens with infinite gusto applies the term, from the gentleman who was leaning out of the window endeavoring, with great perseverance, to spit upon the crown of the hat of a personal friend on the parade below, to the "gentleman who fastened his coat all the way up to his chin by means of a pin and a button alternately, had a very coarse red face and looked like a drunken chaplain, which indeed he was." One feels the hopelessness of attempting in cold blood to say exactly wherein the humor lies.. One can only feel it, and chuckle in silence over it.

Let us look now at the "gentleman" where he is spoken of more genially and with less manifest contempt, but in a manner none the less characteristic. Examples so crowd upon one that it is difficult to make a selection. To take one almost at random, when that most real and lovable of all Dickens's female characters, Esther Summerson, is speaking of the pictures in: her room in Bleak House, she describes one which represented "four angels of Queen Anne's reign taking a complacent gentleman to heaven, in festoons, with some difficulty." By the way, we know that gentleman. We have all met him. We know how complacent he would be in the circumstances; how he would enjoy the angelic escort-and the festoons; how surprised he would be at there being any difficulty about his aerial transit, suggestive perhaps of a doubt (not hitherto in his mind) as to his ultimate destination! Here, again, the introduction of the term "gentleman" is truly Dickepsian.

To refer to the Pickwick Papers once more; in these immortal memoirs, Dickens revels among his own peculiar gentlemen. The Pickwickian gentleman is almost always qualified by some ridiculous peculiarity of dress or general appearance. For instance, in