delicately intuitive sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases of
character, but certainly with the very varied class of persons
represented in these volumes. It may be congruous with this,
perhaps, that her success should be more assured in dealing with the
characters of women than with those of men. The men who pass before
us in her pages, though real and tangible and effective enough, seem,
nevertheless, from time to time to reveal their joinings. They are
composite of many different men we seem to have [58] known, and fancy
we could detach again from the ensemble and from each other. And
their goodness, when they are good, is--well! a little conventional;
the kind of goodness that men themselves discount rather largely in
their estimates of each other. Robert himself is certainly worth
knowing--a really attractive union of manliness and saintliness, of
shrewd sense and unworldly aims, and withal with that kindness and
pity the absence of which so often abates the actual value of those
other gifts. Mrs. Ward's literary power is sometimes seen at its
best (it is a proof of her high cultivation of this power that so it
should be) in the analysis of minor characters, both male and female.
Richard Leyburn, deceased before the story begins, but warm in the
memory of the few who had known him, above all of his great-souled
daughter Catherine, strikes us, with his religious mysticism, as
being in this way one of the best things in the book:--

"Poor Richard Leyburn! Yet where had the defeat lain?

"'Was he happy in his school life?' Robert asked gently. 'Was
teaching what he liked?'

[59] "'Oh! yes, only--' and then added hurriedly, as though drawn on
in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of his look, 'I never knew