stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped as far away from it as he could in "Sir Charles Grandison," but in doing so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding's men is not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar, gave the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine, and Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with them intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life, and was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him what she was not to Scott, "une grande réalité comme la guerre"; and, like war, she had her complications. He found these complications to be for the most part distasteful; but he never assumed that a single key could open all the chambers of her soul.
When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane
