and religious principle, is tainted by his contaminating companionship.  He infuses a subtle skepticism of the reality of goodness by the mere magnetism of his evil presence.  Persons who have been guarded against the usual contrivances by which the conventional Devil works his wonders find themselves impotent before the fascinations of Densdeth.  They follow while they detest him, and are at once his victims and his accomplices.  In those whose goodness, like that of Cecil Dreeme, is founded on purity of sentiment and strength of principle, he excites unmitigated abhorrence and strenuous opposition; but on all those whose excellence is “respectable” rather than vital, who are good by the felicity of their circumstances rather than the force of their conscience, he exercises a fascination almost irresistible.  To everybody, indeed, who has in him any latent evil not overbalanced by the habitual performance of positive duties, Densdeth’s companionship is morally blighting.  The character, fearful in its way as the Mephistopheles of Goethe, is represented with considerable artistic skill.

Though the most really prominent person in the drama, he is, in the representation, kept in the background,—­a cynical, sneering, brilliant demi-devil, who appears only when some plot against innocence is beginning its wiles or approaching its consummation.

The incidents of the novel occur in some of the best-known localities of New York.  Nobody can mistake Chuzzlewit Hotel and Chrysalis College.  Every traveller has put up at the first and visited some literary or artistic friend at the second.  Indeed, Winthrop seems to have deliberately chosen the localities of his story with the special purpose of showing that passions almost as terrible as those which are celebrated in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles may rage in the ordinary lodging-houses of New York.  He has succeeded in throwing an atmosphere of mystery over places which are essentially commonplace; and he has done it by the intensity with which he has conceived and represented the internal thoughts, struggles, and emotions of the men and women by whom these edifices of brick and stone are inhabited.

Though a clear narrator, when the story required clear narration, Winthrop perfectly understood the art of narrating by implication and allusion.  He paints distinctly and minutely, not omitting a single detail, when the occasion demands such faithful representation of real facts and localities; but he has also the power of flashing his meaning by suggestive hints which the most labored description and explication could not make more effective.  He makes the mind of the reader work sympathetically with his own in building up the idea he seeks to convey.  Crimes which are nameless are mutually understood by this refined communion between author and reader.  The mystery of the plot is not directly explained, but each party seems to bring, as in private conversation, his individual sagacity to bear upon the right interpretation.