The Virtuous Victorian
still confessedly a grub. Mr. Britling has "truckled to no domesticated god." The archdeacon's deity is open to such grievous innuendoes. Yet I wish I could have stood on the smooth lawn of Plumstead, and have heard what the archdeacon had to say when he learned that an English scholar and gentleman had smuggled out of England, by the help of a female "confidential agent," a treacherous appeal to the President of the United States, asking that pressure should be brought upon fighting Englishmen in the interests of peace. I wish I could have heard the cawing rooks of Plumstead echo his mighty wrath. For there is that in the heart of a man, even a Victorian churchman with a love of preferment and a distaste for dissenters, which holds scatheless the sacred thing called honour.
Trollope is as frank about the archdeacon's frailties as Mr. Wells is frank about Mr. Britling's frailties. In pip-
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