when they are not caricatures, and certainly in ‘Robert,’ the City waiter of Punch.  But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all Charles Keene’s persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon her.  Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights.  If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts—­the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—­has passed, leaving one trace only:  the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex.  But the vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English—­the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of many another—­and it was not able to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France.  It was the chief immorality destroyed by French fiction.