There are gross improbabilities--Mr.
Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr.Wyndham's liabilities by handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel.

The inhuman uncle and the licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan.

There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a good many other things.

And yet, somehow or other, there are also things very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens--up to the date.

The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some years to do.