us of the Victorians. His splendid
Bishops are as tranquil as if the controversial Newman, and Gladstone
with his Disestablishment programme, had never disturbed the air. And
one fancies that politics must have bored him, so studiously does he
through over thirty years avoid even a slanting glance at the events
which preoccupied Mr. Punch in his cartoons. There is evidence that
there was more than the policy of the Paper in this. Du Maurier was an
optimist. An optimist is a man who thinks that everything is going right
when it is going wrong. It requires an effort of the imagination to
recall and picture the fact that in the first hour of Du Maurier's mere
amusement Ruskin was adding his lachrymation to Carlyle's over a society
going swiftly to Gehenna. It is the entire absence of despair,
bitterness, or cynicism in his work that gives it its altogether unique
place in the history of social satire. Never before was there such a
lenient barb on such a well-aimed arrow.

But if his business is not with the causes which contributed to the
character of English Society in his time, it is with their effects. No
satirist has ever put more highly representative figures on to his
stage. They are so highly representative because they conform so
strictly to type. He puts a valuation upon everyone whom he introduces
on his stage. He shows exactly the regard in which we are to hold them
and their profession. And it is interesting, in the light of the favour
with which he always treated the typical _savant_, to hear from his son
that he was always as much interested in what was being accomplished in
science as in anything else in the world. We must conclude scientists
were first in his estimation as men, from the pains he was at to give
them the appearance of distinction in his pictures. Then he had much
regard for Generals, great Admirals, and other magnificent specimens,
the Adonis, for instance, that figures almost as often, and nearly
always in company with, his charming woman. This gentleman is difficult
to describe. He seems too languid even for the profession of
man-about-town, but his clothes are such that one would think their
irreproachability could only be maintained by a life of dedication to
them. Did he ever exist? Du Maurier is very subtle here. He fully
appreciated the great aim of the public-school-trained man in his own
time--the elaborate care with which an officer studied to conceal an
enthusiasm for the professio