Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/274

 Melema, and Fred Vincy; but rarely is he ridiculed, and then ironically.

Of the bonny young Squire Donnithorne she draws the portrait as he himself would see it:

"* * * candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how can a man's candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. 'No! I'm a devil of a fellow for getting myself into a hobble, but I always take care the load shall fall on my own shoulders.' Unhappily there is no inherent poetic justice in hobbles, and they will sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst consequences on the prime offender, in spite of his loudly-expressed wish. It was entirely owing to this deficiency in the scheme of things that Arthur had ever brought any one into trouble besides himself."

Even when troublesome consequences threatened both himself and others, he was buoyed up by "a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly."

Tito Melema also leaned heavily on the law of compensation:

"It was not difficult for him to smile pleadingly on those whom he had injured, and offer to do them much kindness: and no quickness of intellect could tell him exactly the taste of that honey on the lips of the injured."