betray a nature not attuned to the highest and noblest pitch, and that cannot be expected to stand in the hour of trial.  His first direct lapse is when, against his secret conviction, he supports Tyke as hospital chaplain in opposition to Farebrother; but mainly in mere defiance and resentment of the general style of his reception at the Board meeting, and the opposition he encounters there.  Anon comes his marriage to Rosamond Vincy,—­a marriage prompted by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her prettiness, her external grace and accomplishments.  Led on mainly by his own taste for luxury and external show, he plunges into extravagances of every kind.  Debt inevitably follows, crippling his resources, cramping his energies, fettering him as regards all his higher professional aims and efforts.  To his wife he looks in vain for sympathy or aid.  She only aggravates the difficulties and harassments of his life by her callous selfishness, her dull obdurate insistance on all her own claims, her mean deceits and concealments.  Embarrassments of every kind thicken around him; and at last in the all but universal estimation of his fellows, and nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary relief he becomes accessory to murder.  His end is as sad a one for his character, and in his circumstances, as can well be conceived:  falling from all his high if somewhat arrogant professional aims, his hopes of elevating the general practitioner, and of raising medicine from an art to a science, into the fashionable London lady’s doctor.

Though Mr Farebrother occupies a somewhat less prominent place in the narrative, he is delineated with not less consummate skill.  He comes before us at first a man of genial kindly sympathies, frankly alive to, and frankly acknowledging, his own deficiencies.  There is an utter absence of pretence and affectation about him, a graceful and engaging simplicity and frankness of whole nature, that can hardly fail to win the heart.  All his home relations—­toward mother and sisters—­are singularly touching.  Feeling all his defects as a clergyman, half laughing, half apologetic over his devotion to his favourite Coleoptera, and admitting that which is so far a necessity to him, not of choice, but of actual external need in his narrow circumstances—­admitting, too, the comparatively inferior and uncongenial society into which he is drawn—­the full revelation of his nobler and higher nature begins.  His true and deep appreciation of Mary Garth, and tender, devoted, and unselfish love for her, more clearly reveal his innate manliness, self-denial, and simplicity of character.  This revelation is still further unfolded before us in his entire relations with Fred Vincy.  That firm persistent interview in the billiard-room, is actuated by the one absorbing and self-abnegating desire that he may still be saved from the moral and spiritual decay impending over him:  and when, in answer to Fred’s appeal for his intercession,