rld was an artificial one, and one of not very respectable artifice.
But it worked after a fashion; it was founded on some real, however
unrespectable, facts of humanity; and it was at least amusing to the
naughty players on its stage to begin with, and long afterwards to the
guiltless spectators of the commonty. In _Delphine_ there is not a
glimmer of amusement from first to last, and the whole story is compact
(if that word were not totally inapplicable) of windbags of sentiment,
copy-book headings, and the strangest husks of neo-classic type-worship,
stock character, and hollow generalisation. An Italian is necessarily a
person of volcanic passions; an Englishman or an American (at this time
the identification was particularly unlucky) has, of equal necessity, a
grave and reserved physiognomy. Orthodox religion is a mistake, but a
kind of moral-philosophical Deism (something of the Wolmar type) is
highly extolled. You must be technically "virtuous" yourself, even if
you bring a whole second volume of tedious tortures on you by being so;
but you may play Lady Pandara to a friend who is a devout adulteress,
may force yourself into her husband's carriage when he is carrying her
off from one assignation, and may bring about his death by contriving
another in your own house. In fact, the whole thing is topsy-turvy,
without the slightest touch of that animation and interested curiosity
which topsy-turviness sometimes contributes. But perhaps one should give
a more regular account of it.

[Sidenote: The story.]

Delphine d'Albemar is a young, beautiful, rich, clever, generous, and,
in the special and fashionable sense, extravagantly "sensible" widow,
who opens the story (it is in the troublesome epistolary form) by
handing over about a third of her fortune to render possible the
marriage of a cousin of her deceased husband. This cousin, Matilde de
Vernon, is also beautiful and accomplished, but a _devote_, altogether
well-regulated and well-conducted, and (though it turns out that she has
strong and permanent affections) the reverse of "sensible"--in fact
rather hard and disagreeable--in manner. She has a scheming mother, who
has run herself deeply, though privately, into debt, and the intended
husband and son-in-law, Leonce de Mandeville, also has a mother, who is
half Spanish by blood and residence, and wholly so (according to the
type-theory above glanced at) in family pride, personal _morgue_, and so
forth. A good deal