concerned with the building of a good sentence; as also in that wider
sense, which ensures, in a work like this, with so many joints, so
many currents of interest, a final unity of impression an the part of
the reader, and easy transition by him from one to the other. Well-
used to works of fiction which tell all they have to tell in one thin
volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's three volumes with unflagging
readiness.

For, in truth, that quiet method of evolution, which she pursues
undismayed to the end, requires a certain lengthiness; and the
reader's reward will be in a secure sense that he has been in
intercourse with no mere flighty remnants, but with typical forms, of
character, firmly and fully conceived. We are persuaded that the
author might have written a novel which should have been all shrewd
impressions of society, or all humorous impressions of country life,
or all quiet fun and genial caricature. Actually she has chosen to
combine something of each of these with a very sincerely felt
religious interest; and who will deny that to trace the influence of
religion upon human character is one of the [57] legitimate functions
of the novel? In truth, the modern "novel of character" needs some
such interest, to lift it sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as
men's horizons are enlarged by religion, of whatever type it may be--
and we may say at once that the religious type which is dear to Mrs.
Ward, though avowedly "broad," is not really the broadest. Having
conceived her work thus, she has brought a rare instinct for
probability and nature to the difficult task of combining this
religious motive and all the learned thought it involves, with a very
genuine interest in many varieties of average mundane life.

We should say that the author's special ethical gift lay in a