While the Coreys try faithfully to compass the best that is known and thought in the world, the Laphams go to the other extreme, and touch depths of ignorance and vulgarity almost incredible for a family living in Boston with eyes to see, ears to hear, and, above all, money to spend.  For a sort of superficial culture is a part of the modern inheritance, and seems to belong to the universal air.  Even Penelope Lapham—­the elder daughter, who is a girl of remarkable shrewdness and gifted besides with a keen satirical sense which makes her the family wit—­is content to laugh at the family failings and provincialisms without any definite idea of how they might be corrected.  But the Laphams are all the more interesting because they display no feeble and tentative gentilities.  Mrs. Lapham’s acceptance of Mrs. Corey’s invitation to dinner, in which she signs herself “Yours truly, Mrs. S. Lapham,” initiates some delightful scenes in the comedy.  The colonel’s resolution to go to the dinner in a frock-coat, white waistcoat, black cravat, and ungloved hands, and his eventual panicky substitution of correct evening dress regardless of cost, the anxieties of his wife and daughter on the question of suitable raiment, the great affair itself, when the colonel comes out in a new character,—­all this part of the book shows in a high degree Mr. Howells’s bright vein of humor.

But, putting aside the humor and comedy of “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” the book has other points of value, and, as a study of a business-man whom success floats to the crest of the wave only to let him be overwhelmed by disaster as the surge retreats, presents a striking similitude to Balzac’s “Cesar Birotteau.”  In each case we find a self-made man elated by a sense of his commercial greatness, confident that the point he has already attained, instead of being the climax of his career, is the stepping-stone to yet greater wealth, besides social distinction.  Cesar Birotteau inaugurates what he believes to be his era of magnificence with a ball, while Silas Lapham tempts fortune by building a fine house on the back bay.  Each hero projects his costly schemes in opposition to the wishes of a more sensible and prudent wife, and each, at the moment when fate seemed bent on crowning his ambition, falls a prey to a series of cruel and, in a way, undeserved misfortunes, and finds his well-earned commercial credit a mere house of cards which totters to its fall.  Each man, broken and bankrupt, displays in his feebleness a moral strength he had not shown in his days of power:  thus the name, “the rise of Silas Lapham,” means his initiation into a clearer and more exalted knowledge of his obligations to himself and to his kind.  The moral of Cesar Birotteau’s “grandeur et decadence” strikes a still deeper key-note.  Compared with Balzac, who is never trivial, and who has the most unerring instinct for character and motive, Mr. Howells wastes his force on non-essentials and is carried