a better chance of having his foolishness shaken out of him in his more exposed and strenuous life. Both these conditions are implied in a reflection made by one of Trollope's characters. Isabel Boncassen, the frank American beauty, looks upon the young man as a type:[1]
"Young men are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess.
They never have their wits about them. They never mean what
they say, because they don't understand the use of words. They
are generally half impudent and half timid. When in love they
do not at all understand what has befallen them. What they
want they try to compass as a cow does when it stands stretching
out its head toward a stack of hay which it cannot reach.
Indeed, there is no such thing as a young man, for a man is not
really a man till he is middle-aged. But take them at their
worst, they are a deal too good for us, for they become men some
day, whereas we must only be women to the end."
Dickens is again a contributor of portraits, though not of
the best, and is joined this time by Thackeray, Trollope,
and Meredith.
Tom Gradgrind, product of a system, and Edmund Sparkler, product of a lack of system, deserve mention, as does Edward Dorrit, though sketched without color. Rawdon Crawley and Joseph Sedley, no longer in first flush of youth, are consistent exponents of gullible good nature and ponderous vacuity. But the two prizes of undeviating stupidity are Sir Felix Carbury and Algernon Blancove.
Sir Felix is a spoiled darling and an excrescence on the face of the earth. His accomplishments are set forth in a description of his state of enforced solitude consequent upon his latest exhibition of monumental inefficiency:[2]
