_North and South_ is perhaps on the whole the best place in which to study Mrs.Gaskell's art: for _Wives and Daughters_ is unfinished and the books just named are tentatives.

It begins by laying a not inconsiderable hold on the reader: and, as it is worked out at great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthening and improving that hold.

It is certain that, in some cases, she does not do this: and the reason is the same--the failure to project and keep in action definite and independent characters, and the attempt to make weight and play with purposes and problems.

The heroine's father--who resigns his living and exposes his delicate wife and only daughter, if not exactly to privation, to discomfort and, in the wife's case, fatally unsuitable surroundings, because of some never clearly defined dissatisfaction with the creed of the Church (_not_ apparently with Christianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies "promiscuously," to be followed, in equally promiscuous fashion, by a friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a fortune--is one of those nearly contemptible imbeciles in whom it is impossible to take an interest.

In respect to the wife Mrs.Gaskell commits the curious mistake of first suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's folly and of hopeless disease.