When tempted by the man whom she loved, and who loved her all the more because he was married to another, she replied:-

"I can't, I won't, deliberately injure another woman. Think how she would suffer! Oh, the torture of woman's lives-the helplessness, the impotence, the emptiness!"

"But all we modern women mean to help each other now." which is good news that the world will be glad to have confirmed by higher authority than the optimist author of "The Story of a Modern Woman."

Miss Hepworth Dixon sums up her book's position thus:

In "The Story of a Modern Woman" I wished to show how hardly our social laws press on women, how, in fact, it is too often the woman who is made, as it were, the moral scapegoat, and who is sent out into the wilderness to expiate the sins of man. Number Twenty-Seven," ruined and thrown aside by Dunlop Strauge, is reduced to the streets and to an ignoble death in a hospital. Mary, jilted by her lover at a time when her chances of marriage are over, is condemned to a long loveless life and a solitary battle with the world. The keynote of the book is the phrase: "All we modern women mean to help each other now. If we were united, we could lead the world." It is a plea for a kind of moral and social trades-unionism among women.

"JOANNA TRAILL: SPINSTER."

I now come to a story of how one Modern Woman did

help another with the best results. "Joanna Traill, Spinster," the story with which Mr. Heinemann has begun his Pioneer Series, is the only one of all the Modern Woman novels which has the courage boldly to face the question of the woman of the pavement. Most of the other stories do not go further than the depicting of monogamic prostitution, or of love unions unconsecrated by law and religion. Miss Holdsworth in "Joanna Traill" goes a step further and attempts to place the woman who has slipped, or who has been betrayed into the meshes of the ordinary polyandry of the street, in her true light. Not that there is any attempt to describe the life of such women. We only meet Christine after she had left it. The poor child-for she was only sixteen-tells her story twice over-once to Joanna, and once a year later to the man who had asked her to marry him. It is the only glimpse we have of her experiences. Here is the tale as she told it to Joanna:

There's nothing to tell," said the girl, becoming unexpectedly sulky. "Father was a schoolmaster, starved out by the board schools. A woman took me to live with her when he dies. She dies too; and I worked in a match factory. But I couldn't get what would keep me, and I fell ill. Then a girl they called Nella took me to her house. And they nursed me and were kind. I got plenty to eat there, and they promised me pretty clothes when I got better. And I owed the woman money, and I didn't know how to pay her. And Nella was happy, and it seemed easy enough, so one night "-she stopped, turned pale, and dropped her head. Then she looked up defiantly, and dashed away the tears from her eyes. "And I'd have killed myself afterwards if Mr. Boas hadn't found me," she concluded.

And here is the same story which the heart-broken girl sobbed out to the man who had asked her to be his wife, knowing nothing of her history :

"But it was sin," she moaned. "Though they were good to me, it was sin. Three weeks I was there...And I never thought...Every one was the same...Nella...she was kind ...and the rest...It was...a shameful place!...I knew afterwards...too late...that...that it was hell."

It is obvious that a girl in such circumstances, a mere child, confronted with the ruthless compulsion of an evil destiny, was far less guilty from a moral point of view

than any young person who reads a risqué novel which she knows should be forbidden fruit. But technically and actually Christine was "on the town." Physically she was no longer intact, and in a society which has substituted the virtue of intactitude for the grace of purity, that was enough. Christine was a lost girl, a fallen girl, so-called. But she was rescued by a newspaper editor, who somehow reminds one of John Burns, and her restoration to virtue was undertaken by Joanna Traill, a lady of means living in a country house in Surrey, who is fired by an enthusiasm for helping the suffering, a generous flame kindled, if the truth must be told, at the torch of her own love for the editor in question. The story of Joanna Traill is the story of Christine's redemption. Christine, who was a charming young person, abundantly well worth saving, flatly refused to be saved in the ordinary normal way. Joanna had offered to take her into her own house after she had undergone some preliminary discipline in a home. Christine revolted at once. She would not go to any such establishment. "I know them homes. They kill you with their pious ways. Good people ain't kind, like bad 'uns. I won't go. I don't want to be a good woman-not that sort leastways."

So Joanna consents to take the wild young girl fresh from the slums down to the country house in Surrey. The experiment at first was a failure. Christine was placed in the kitchen and given in charge of the housekeeper. Joanna sat lonely in her drawing-room, while Christine pined downstairs. The housekeeper eyed her askance, and the situation soon became intolerable. Christine was on the verge of running away when Joanna took a heroic resolve. Disregarding everything but the risk of Christine's relapse, she took her upstairs into the drawing-room and treated her no longer as a servant but as a daughter. The dictum was laid down that "the first course in her salvation is amusement," and the reader will agree with Mr. Boas when he declared, after seeing Christine in her new metamorphosis, "a confoundedly pleasant way to be saved it is." Christine, on her pony riding gaily over the common, learning to play the piano, and revelling in all Joanna's books, had a good time of it. She had even a better time shortly after, when Mr. Boas's friend Mr. Bevan came down to dine with Joanna, and fell in love with the little sprite. No one had said a word as to her past, and he proposed marriage before Joanna clearly saw unto what a pass she had allowed things to drift. Joanna then, instead of telling him herself, insisted upon Christine breaking the news. This she did, feeling sure he loved her so that he would forgive her for the misfortune of her youth. Instead of doing so, this is what happened :

"Woman!" he said at last, the word scorching his lips like a live coal; "woman! you can't mean that! It is not true; for God's sake tell me it is not true! You were not... three weeks... in one of those dens."

"Oh, my God! a baby like that!" he cried.... "And I worshipped your white soul. . . .”

"My love is dead! Did you think any man's love could stand-that? Let me go," he said again sternly. "It is better for both of us."

And with many more bitter burning words of passionate and savage reproach, this man, over whose "high passion and noble purity" Miss Holdsworth waxes unnecessarily eloquent, flings off poor Christine and vanishes in blinding rage. Whereupon Christine writes this little note to Joanna, "It is no use trying to be good. I am going back. Don't try to find me. Girls like me can't be saved," and returns there and then to the old house of ill-fame.

I will not spoil the reader's interest in the story by saying how it ends-they can read that for themselves. I have said enough to indicate this Modern Woman's idea that it is better to try to redeem the lost by developing their wings instead of hobbling their feet. The book is good and true and well written. It is a healthy sign of the times indicating much thawing of many icy barriers, when we have this loving warm-hearted protest against the social ostracism that seals the unfortunate's doom even when she still lives, especially when we know it is written by a woman in full blazing revolt against what her Mr. Boas denounces as "These damned conventions." "A SUNLESS HEART."

The last book on my list is so different from all the others that I had more than once some doubt whether it ought to be included under the heading of the novels of the Modern Woman. But its intrinsic merits, its

66
THE AUTHOR OF A SUNLESS HEART."
(From a photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co.)

originality, and its pathos, its distinctively woman's outlook into life, and the singular glow and genius of its author forbids its omission. In "A Sunless Heart" we have the first work of a woman who has suffered, and who has trodden out the wine of life in the winepress of misery and despair. It is a woman's novel treating woman as an object of interest apart from her relations to lovers, and the difference is made all the more remarkable because it deals with the love of a sister for a brother, and the love of women for each other.

In the apology to the chapter entitled "Lotus," the author, who has not even a pseudonym or a nom de plume, thus explains her point of view:

lives such love plays but a minor part, or enters not at all. Will no one voice them, or find beauty in them?

To the readers who feel that humanity will right itself the sooner for facing all its wrongs, and more particularly to-day the wrongs which, through many past ages, woman have silently borne, I commend "Lotus."

Lastly, to all who feel that men and women will come to closer and higher relationships, when they cease to wear masks each towards the other sex, removed when in the company of their own, to those I have tried to show, in all purityof intent, and belief in the best of humanity, what women may be, and often are, to one another.

Lotus, the gifted but unhappy heroine of "The Sunless Heart," inspires the most ardent affection in all her girl friends. She is a teacher in a girls' high school, and every one falls in love with her fellow-teachers, schoolgirls, friends, all love her to distraction. But amid all this tempest of adoration Lotus remains calm and unmoved. She says herself:

"If the doctrine of re-incarnation be true, I must before have been a man of many loves, and the women somehow recognise the old lover.... Think of the woman, held by the awful bonds of sex, seeing the spirit of the old love gazing at them through the eyes of a woman who cannot love them back." Lotus, whose sunless heart gives the title to this anonymous and sombre story, is a young woman who, when a mere child, is subjected to the extremity of outrage by her sister's husband. She becomes a mother. before she is more than half through her teens, and although she is a good mother, the laughter of the little one never brings back the sunlight into the life of Lotus. The outraged child, become woman under the sacrifice of premature and uninvited maternity, set herself bravely to struggle with her evil destiny and to battle down the almost insurmountable obstacles which opposed her progress. She was witty, capable, and possessed of a witchery of fascination which seems to have been more fatal on women than on men. The character of Lotus is the gem of the book. Gasparine, the luckless Gaspar, and the others are but as setting to the figure of the young-old teacher whom everybody feared and everybody loved, and nobody understood. Lotus is a distinct creation-vivid, life-like and original-a welcome relief from the horde of commonplace mediocrities with which most novels are cumbered. You do not wonder that women loved her. You only fail to understand how it was that men did not. The passions of love and jealousy she excited among her girl friends are described with a minute fidelity of detail; but although they all loved her to distraction, she regarded them all with pitying indifference. Her sun had set while still it was high noon, and there was cold darkness in her heart.

Too, too often," says the unhappy but gifted girl, "the blow that humiliates the body also profanes the soul. I feel my soul profaned. . . . The power to love or to believe in love is dead in me. I said a great perfect unquestioning love would heal me. I knew what I said. I spoke of the impossible! You see the agony was so great. . . that wicked and unnatural outrage dried up with flaming fire each natural and womanly impulse, turning my child heart to stone, my mother instincts to gall. Yet when I found I could not love I found too that I could act love irresistibly and in return give patience and gentleness. To all them distant in humanity my dead hands stretch yearningly. I am indeed like one dead. It would seem the very smell of death is on me, so the people draw back.

The child had been compelled to submit for four years, from twelve to sixteen, to the brutalities of the man who subsequently married her sister-"four years of slavery, torture, secrecy, and mortal terror." Yet though she did not love him, "I was proud of his attention, half proud

even of his brutalities," which is probably a true touch, strange though it may seem. The prematurely aroused sex instinct often clings to the man who has roused it, even though the reason recognises that he has inflicted a cruel and remediless wrong.

Lotus, with this dead heart in her bosom, but with infinite capacities for patience and tenderness, commands the love and devotion not merely of Gasparine, but of a bright and beautiful creature, Mona Lefcadio by name. Mona writes Lotus "beautiful letters speaking the worship of a young pure opening soul for a larger nature which it had idealised."

Hence much jealousy and many tears. After a time, however, the destined man arrived who kindled in Lotus's dead heart the living flame of love. And then, with the bitter irony of fate, the man she loved made love not to Lotus but to Mona. I leave the readers to find out for themselves how the story ends, merely assuring them that the author is far too much a woman of her generation to avert the tragedy which broods in every chapter, and which culminates and bursts fatally in the last.

"A Sunless Heart" is a woman's book-a young woman's book-it has been brewed in bitterness, and the atmosphere over it is sorrow and pain, and a grim sense of bitter destiny.

In reply to my question as to what she wanted to prove, the authoress wrote:

What I wanted to do in "A Sunless Heart" was to show people the awful and hideous crime, the worst, the unpardonable one of taking advantage of weakness. It is all one to me, whether it is taking advantage of man's weakness or woman's weakness-the crime is the same. And the crime is unending; the effects can never be eradicated. The nature that is subjected against its will and without its knowledge-I mean without the aquiescence of its reason and soul-will bear the impress of the slave upon it while it lives. Therefore I want fair play and justice; not to make women ape the man, but to let women know and choose. Another thing I wanted to showthe absolute rottenness of our social distinctions and conventions, and the eternal wisdom of the sayings, "Judge not that ye be not judged," and "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone."

WHAT WILL THE END BE?

What will be the effect of all this kind of writing upon the girls who are just flowering into womanhood? The effect of the revolt of the modern woman against loveless marriage, enforced motherhood, and the untrained ignorance of the blindfold régime-all that is healthy and good. Not less useful is their yearning cry for "a white life for two" and their impassioned protest against the accepted social doctrine that any second-hand bridegroom is good enough for a stainless bride. But there is reason to fear that the recoil against social conventions even when hideously unjust, nay, because of their hideous injustice, may be carried so far as to bring into existence evils which will afflict as with a scourge of knotted cords many of the coming women. All this natural and legitimate use of genuine but lawless love as a foil to bring into stronger relief the hatefulness of loveless marriage will operate, is now operating in the direction of debasing the moral standard of the ordinary woman to the level of the ordinary standard of the ordinary man. Hitherto where a girl has been pressed by her too ardent suitor to ignore the restrictions of law and religion, she has been sustained in her resistance by the consciousness of the universality and cruelty of the verdict which will be passed upon her if she yields. The man also has, to some slight extent, been restrained by the knowledge that his success entailed the social ruin of the girl whom he professed to love. Poth these restraining

forces are being relaxed; and it would be irrational optimism not to see that the results will, in many cases, be disastrous. The example of women has a great and And increasing influence upon the conduct of women. the selfish corrupter of womanly innocence is prompt to use the precepts and example of other women to overcome the barriers of scruple behind which his victim feebly attempts to resist his advances. Of this I had, the other day, a very significant and very painful illustration.

THE EXAMPLE OF GEORGE ELIOT.

"Why not do as George Eliot did?' If I have had that said to me once, I have had it said to me twenty times by men in London." The speaker was a young lady with a childlike face, beautiful exceedingly, with a sweet ingenuous innocence about it that was almost startling from its incongruity with the remark I am quoting. She was but just out of her teens, and had been for a year or two making her living as best she could in the great city. It was a hard struggle at first, surmounted happily now. "Who possesseth much?" asked Diego de Estella, the Spanish mystic. "Even he that desireth little," and my friend was able to survive, not so much by the extent of her resources as by the paucity of her wants. She was telling me the story of her adventures when she dropped the above remark. "I can live quite comfortable," she said, "on ten shillings a week. have no idea how much nourishment there is in a pennyworth of haricot beans. But sometimes you find it difficult even to get your ten shillings, and then it is the temptation is so hard. I don't think any girl need go wrong unless she wants to, but when you are all alone in London without any money in your purse, if you don't, it is not for lack of opportunity. And always it was George Eliot," she repeated. Why don't you do as George Eliot did? See how happy she was living with Lewes he was a married man. Why not let me be your Mr. Lewes? You would be far happier than struggling for bare life.""

666

ALAS POOR CRESSID!

" or

You

It was not the first time I had heard this. But it was usually from the other side. Women, impatient of the hardship and dreary loneliness of their position, have often pleaded George Eliot's example as a justification for yielding to their inclination. Sometimes they do so after they have taken the plunge, oftener it is before, when they are contemplating it. "George Eliot, why should I not do as she did?" is a phrase often on the lips of those who never read "Romola" "Middlemarch." "She did not lose caste, she was not a bad woman; her books, people say, are wonderful. But she lived with a married man as if she had been his wife. Now, there is Mr. So-and-So who is very unhappy with his wife. He is passionately in love with me. If George Eliot- -" and so forth and so forth. That I had often heard, for since the Maiden Tribute women have discussed these matters of conduct with me almost as if I had been a Confessor. But I had not heard, till this bright young girl mentioned it in passing, that the greatest woman novelist of our time had been appropriated as a weapon for assailing the virtue and ruining the lives of her less powerful and less gifted sisters.

It sounds no doubt a harsh thing to say it, but it is not nearly so harsh as the fact that the honoured name of George Eliot, which with most of us is inseparably associated with much of the tenderest but sternest moral teaching of English literature, is by many regarded only as the supreme example of the success which, even in society, can sometimes be achieved by lawless love.

Another direction in which the novel of the Modern Woman points to danger is that in which it leans towards increased facility of divorce. That there is such a tendency is unmistakable. It will operate evilly for society, but its most disastrous consequences will be felt by women themselves. Some of these novels of our day are written by creatures who have been unkindly denied by nature the instincts of their sex, and few of them have had the advantage of personal experience of marriage and of motherhood. But they reflect only too accurately the confused ideas, the crass ignorance, and the lack of experience which characterise many of the young women of the day, who do not write novels, but who are making experiments in living with all the recklessness natural to those who have not learnt the a, b, c, of the elemental forces amid which they imagine they

For we cannot put back the clock of time, and the ferment of the new wine will not be stayed by warnings as to the danger to the old bottles into which it has been poured. Woman having discovered, apparently very much to her own astonishment, that she has really a soul after all, and that all the rhapsodies of the poets but faintly suggest the essential divinity of the element of sex, is not going to go back to her old position. Through whatever stormy seas and across no matter what burning desert marked by the skeletons and haunted by the ghosts of those who have fallen by the way, she will press on; fleeing from the monogamic prostitution of loveless marriage and the hideous outrage of enforced maternity as Bunyan's Pilgrim fled from the City of Destruction. All social conventions, all religious teachings, and all moral conceptions will have to be reconsidered and readjusted in harmony with this new central factor in the problem, and woe be to us if we leave that reconstructive task to the fretful fingers of impatient ignorance or the hot hand of impulsive passion.

EAR MR. SMURTHWAYTE,-June has been a

quiet month, void of sensation-of course I speak

of books alone,—and adding but little to the literature of the year. The twelve weeks of June, July, and August are always quiet with publishers, and even in the book-shops, as you will see from the following list, the successes, with two exceptions, are works which have reached a cheap edition, or which have been some while before the public:-

The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man. By Professor Drummond.

Books on Parish and District Councils.

A Superfluous Woman.

The Jungle Book. By Rudyard Kipling.

A Little Child's Wreath. By Elizabeth Rachel Chapman. Lombard Street in Lent: A Course of Sermons on Social Subjects.

A Yellow Aster. By Iota.

The Invisible Playmate: A Story of the Unseen. By William Canton.

Fifty Years of My Life in the World of Sport at Home and Abroad. By Sir John Dugdale Astley.

Perhaps the most encouraging item in this list is that which points to an awakening of interest in the different books on parish and district councils. But I am especially glad to see that Miss Chapman's book, "A Little Child's Wreath," which I praised very highly last month, is meeting with the reception which it deserves. Another little volume, not of verse but of prose intermingled with verse, which appears in this list, is Mr. William Canton's "The Invisible Playmate," a book with a motive not unlike Miss Chapman's, for it, too, breathes the deepest spirit of regret and almost inconsolable grief for the death of a little child. But unlike the little one whose loss Miss Chapman has sung in so beautiful a series a sonnets, Mr. Canton's baby-heroine was responsible for much recourse to the muse even during her life. Carrying her

up and down the house on his shoulder, to breakfast and to bed, the little woman's father evolved a series of nursery rhymes and ballads perfect and charming in their naïve simplicity. What think you of this, for instance, as a song for little children :

She was a treasure; she was a sweet;

She was the darling of the Army and the Fleet!
When-she-smiled-

The crews of the line-of-battle ships went wild!
When-she-cried-

Whole regiments reversed their arms and sighed!
When she was sick, for her sake

The Queen took off her crown and sobbed as if her heart would break.

The little poem has just that touch of extravagance which children love. But you will find that the book has too its deeply pathetic side, and here it trenches on that ground of image and phantom in which some children seem so much at home.

You may possibly have felt some little curiosity at seeing the announcement of a book entitled "The New Party." It is the rage of the day. Everything is labelled new nowadays. The New Journalism, the New Humour, the New Woman, the New Unionism, and now it is only fit that we have "The New Party." There is so little novelty in many of these, that it is to be feared that the announcement of "The New Party" will create but a languid interest in those who have examined half-a-dozen new things, and found them so like the old that it was difficult to tell t'other from which. "The New Party," however, is so new that it can hardly be said as yet to have an existence. It is a Party of the Future rather than of the Present, and exists fonly within the two covers of the book which Mr. Andrew Reid has edited, and Messrs. Hodder Brothers have published. Its name is the Isocratic Party, a title which

is as good as a guessing story. It seems to be an established principle that, when you cannot have a good, simple name, your title cannot be too mysterious. Mr. Grant Allen is its god-father, and among its prophets there is a miscellaneous assortment of poets, philanthropists, parsons, and politicians of all kinds. Mr. Walter Crane sings of the "New Era," and Mr. Herbert Burrows discourses upon "Principles, Hopes, and Ideals." "Sarah Grand " tells us "What to aim at"; Mr. Dearmer waxes eloquent in praise of the "Social Work of the Undivided Church;" the Dean of Westminster, the Rev. C. L. Marson, and the Rev. Dr. Horton describe the religious aspect of the Isocrats. Dr. Alfred Russel

Wallace tells us all about the "Social Economy of the Future;" Mr. Alfred Foster, a London Guardian, describes "London's Pauper Chaos," which may be said to illustrate the social economy of the present. Lady Henry Somerset, Mrs. Francis Hicks, and Miss Margaret Macmillan write on Women, Factory Girls, and related subjects. Mr. Fred Hammill and Mr. Keir Hardie set forth the views of the Independent Labour Party. "Nunquam" of the Clarion describes the "New Party of the North." Mr. Byles, of Bradford, writes on "Imperial and Social Ideals," from which it would seem that in Foreign Policy the New Party is to be nothing more nor less than a resurrection of the old Manchester Little Englander School. The Rev. W. J. Dawson sings the "Song of the Peoples;" Mr. Richard Le Gallienne asks in verse what he should do with his vote, and finishes with giving it up, the Isocratic candidate not being in the field, and, finally, Mr. Andrew Reid brings up the rear with a dithyrambic dissertation concerning "Our Policy," which he sums up in the Duke of Wellington's final order at Waterloo-"Let the whole line advance." Unfortunately, this is just exactly the last thing that the New Party is doing. Instead of bringing up the whole line of social reformers to attain those objects upon which all decent people are agreed, they are careering far ahead in a fashion which I have no doubt you will regard as magnificent, but not as war.

A book of a similar kind, but much less ambitious and optimist, is Mr. Arnold White's "English Democracy: its Promises and Perils." You will remember "Problems of a Great City," a book which Mr. White published long ago, and by which he established his right to be regarded as a serious authority in the discussion of social questions. Mr. White writes sententiously, and every page is full of thought. You will be pleased to know that he regards the increasing influence of good women, the infusion of Jewish mind and thrift, and the gradual recovery of the reasoned conviction that the main lessons of our English Bible are true, as among the more hopeful elements of the situation. The book is one to be read slowly, and thought over carefully. Mr. White's description of the vulgar, notorious ladies of our smart set as abandoned women in the true sense of the term, is sarcastic but accurate. You will be glad to see also that Mr. White does not shirk the Population Question. He hopes that some high intelligence, some one pure and holy among women, instinct with enthusiasm for her sex, will rise up to carry on the work which Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant took up with the best intentions in the world, but with such unfortunate results for the cause which they championed.

The best book of travels of the month is the posthumous work of the late Sir Gerald Portal. "The British Mission to Uganda in 1893" is a composite work, the bulk of which was written by our late Special Commissioner, the balance made up by the diary of the late

Captain Raymond Portal. Mr. Rennell Rodd, Sir Gerald Portal's successor at Zanzibar, writes a memoir of the brilliant young Englishman who perished in the very prime of his manhood; and Lord Cromer, in a touching introduction, tells us how great a loss the Empire suffered when Sir Gerald Portal died. The book is copiously illustrated, and is the latest and most authentic account of the latest annex to the Empire.

Mr. Andrew Lang's "Common-sense and the Cock Lane Ghost" is a collection of characteristic observations by the most popular literary essayist of the day upon subjects which are more and more commanding the [attention of the civilised world. Mr. Lang is not the stuff of which enthusiasts are made, but he has sufficient of the sixth sense to see that there is more in Borderland than is the fashion among most men of his set.

I am glad to hear that you like the little book by Mr. Hayes, on the "Great Revolution of 1905." You will be interested in knowing that Mr. Alfred R. Wallace has been so much taken by it as to write a leading article, analysing and praising it, in Land and Labour. Mr. Hayes has made an honest and painstaking attempt to think out the next stage in social evolution, and you will probably find more practical interest in this little book than the more posing volume of " The New Party."

You have often spoken to me concerning the difficulty you have had in finding good, popular addresses to read to the working men in your village club, whom you gather together for a social evening on Sunday nights. Most of the sermons that are published are too conventional for your purpose. I think I have come upon the very thing that will suit you. It is a book by the Rev. Charles Leach, éntitled " Sunday Evenings with Working Men." Mr. Leach has delivered these Sunday Afternoon Lectures to crowded audiences of from 1,500 to 2,000 working men, and you will find that while his discourses are not above the heads of any intelligent listener, they are full of good sense, humour, illustration, and interesting and suggestive observations.

After these books of serious weight perhaps the next place should be given to Mr. Le Gallienne's "Prose Fancies," which, relatively to the amount of praise it has evoked, is very important indeed. But I must confess that the book has disappointed me. In the Westminster Gazette and in the Academy Mr. Grant Allen has hailed it as a work of the highest genius, but to my mind it is by no means an advance upon its author's "Book Bills of Narcissus," which, published three years ago, still remains one of the most charming volumes of prose of the decade. Nearly all the papers in the present volume are reprinted from the newspapers and weekly reviews. The best-as "A Borrowed Sovereign" and "Sandra Belloni's Pinewood"-date back three or four years; the majority have appeared in the Speaker during the last twelve months. Perhaps it is the daily wear and tear of critical journalism which has gone to weaken the very peculiar and intimate charm of Mr. Le Gallienne's prose style; but, whatever the cause, there seems to me no question that it is in such pieces as "A Tavern Night" (written, it is manifest, before the majority of its companions) he is at his best. And yet, perhaps " White Soul," the last paper in the collection and the last to be written, is the finest and most delicate piece of prose work that he has achieved. Here, more than on any other page, he seems to have arrived nearer the mystery, the heart, fragrant and elusive, of all created things. And with all the disappointment with this collection which I have confessed to above, I can still honestly recommend the book to every lover of literature. Its very faults are the defects of its virtues;