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146 dreadful mind of woman succeeded in constructing such an appalling automaton of a female prig in black coat and breeches as Robert Elsmere? How abject is its failure as a creation, as a character, as a recognisable human being! How utterly tiresome and tenth-rate as an embodiment of any species of sublunary 'thought'! Whence, then, the astonishing success of the book? From the simplest causes. Here you have expressed for you the respectable religious liberalism of the hour. And it is absolutely and completely revised and amended up to date and not a day (not an hour) over—nothing inserted, nothing left out, which could shock or fail to attract the good masquerading Philistines and Philistinesses who work our woe. It is charitably to be added that some of the sub-characters, especially the women, are realised a little more adequately; and then there is a piquant platonic love intrigue, intensified by the base alloy of personal caricature. For, after all, it was Mrs. Ward's first actual book, and under all the intellectual flummery of her hapless 'theology' lay the gift of clever, partial, and spiteful observation which is the heritage of the everlasting daughter of Eve. In her second book she found her little personal store all but exhausted; she was urged on by the cheering coteries to a higher flight, and the results all round were disastrous.