and to the vast majority of those who follow it gives very little indeed.  Mr. Barton is not a gentleman—­a defect which the farmers and tradespeople of his parish are not slow to discover, and for which they despise him.  He is without any misgivings as to himself or suspicion of his deficiencies in any way, and his conduct is correctly described in a lisping speech of the “secondary squire” of his parish, “What an ath Barton makth of himthelf!” Yet for this stupid man our sympathy is bespoken, merely because he has a wife so much too good for him that we are almost inclined to be angry with her for her devotion to him.

Tina is an undisciplined, abnormal little creature, without good looks or any attractive quality except a talent for music, and with a temper capable of the most furious excesses.  Although Janet is described as handsome, amiable, and cultivated, all these good properties are overwhelmed in our thoughts of her by the degrading vice of which she is to be cured; while her prophet, Mr. Tryan, although very zealous in his work, is avowedly a narrow Calvinist, wanting in intellectual culture, very irritable, not a little bitter and uncharitable, excessively fond of applause without being very critical as to the quarter from which it comes, and strongly possessed with the love of domination.  Tom Tulliver is hard, close, unimaginative, self-confident, repelling, with a stern rectitude of a certain kind, but with no understanding of or toleration for any character different from his own.  Philip Wakem is a personage as little pleasant as picturesque.  Maggie, as a child—­although in her father’s opinion “too clever for a gell”—­is foolish, vain, self-willed, and always in some silly scrape or other; and when grown up, her behaviour is such, even before the climax of the affair with Stephen Guest, that the dislike of the St. Ogg’s ladies for her might have been very sufficiently accounted for even if they had not had reason to envy her superior beauty.

But of all the characters for whom our authoress has been pleased to bespeak our interest, Hetty Sorrel is the most remarkable for unamiable qualities.  She is represented as “distractingly pretty,” and we hear a great deal about her “kitten-like beauty,” and her graceful movements, looks, and attitudes.  But this is all that can be said for her.  Her mind has no room for anything but looks and dress; she has no feeling for anybody but her little self; and is only too truly declared by Mrs. Poyser to be “no better than a peacock, as ’ud strut about on the wall, and spread its tail when the sun shone, if all the folks i’ the parish was dying”—­“no better nor a cherry, wi’ a hard stone inside it."[1] Over and over this view of Hetty’s character is enforced on us, from the time when, early in the first volume, we are told that hers “was a springtide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence.[2] ...”