e says of
his sister Eliza. He is a man, so, at the last stage of
self-satisfaction, he despises what is not man--woman. "Now I spoke
gently to Lorna, seeing how much she had been tried; and I praised her
for her courage, in not having run away, when she was so unable; and my
darling was pleased with this. . . . But you may take this as a
general rule, that a woman likes praise from the man she loves, and
cannot stop always to balance it." "But he led me aside in the course
of the evening, and told me all about it; saying that I knew, as well
as he did, that it was not women's business. . . . Herein I quite
agreed with him, because I always think that women, of whatever mind,
are best when least they meddle with things that appertain to men." As
the matter under discussion was a question of their all having their
throats cut by the Doones, and the farm being burnt over their heads,
it seems to us to have been, at least in some slight degree, the
women's business.

The hero of "Ravenshoe," Charles, is of the same type, though not drawn
with the firmness of touch with which Blackmore depicts John Ridd, and
which makes him indeed a living personality to us, even if one to
quarrel with.

Charles Ravenshoe is of the type which for many years we have striven
to present to the contemplation of the outside world as the perfect
Englishman. He is a bluff, hearty fellow, without serious vices,
without, also, serious virtues; he has, of course, a perfect
self-satisfaction, and a deep and unconscious selfishness, tempered by
an easy good-nature and a superficial benevolence, of wishing to get on
well with everybody, and to see everybody round him comfortable. He is
without ideals or spiritual aims, and has a contemptuous tolerance for
them, as in the case of his brother Cuthbert, who is deeply religious
and desirous of entering a monastery, and yet is held by the
temptations of the world, so that his mind is a continual striving and
renunciation. Charles's relationship with the lady of his choice may
be gauged by the following: "How is Adelaide?" asks his adopted sister.
"Adelaide is all that the fondest lover could desire," he answers. Did
the Englishmen of the nineteenth century really talk like that about
their dearest and most intimate affairs?

And yet here is John Ridd, the accepted lover of Lorna, an honest,
clumsy, self-satisfied couple of yards of a man, for whom she has to be
properly grateful in a world of v