where the intercalation of long conversations with changes of places and personages is hurtful, almost destructive, to the effect.  This appears to be the result of too close an adherence to fact, which brings us back to our original grievance against dramatizing history.  The loss of force from lack of concentration probably arises from carelessness, haste or want of revision.  From the same causes may spring, too, sundry anachronisms of expression, such as “For God’s sake;” vulgarisms like “Leave me alone” for “Let me alone;” extraordinary commonplaces, as in the comparison of popular favor to a weathercock, and of woman’s love to a flower worn, then thrown aside; and a constant lapsing from the energy and spirit of the dialogue into flatness, familiarity and triviality.  There is an occasional not unwholesome coarseness which recalls Mr. Story’s Elizabethan masters, as in the following passage: 

            What a crew is this
  Which just have fled!  Foul suckers that drop off
  When they no more can on their victims gorge! 
  This Tigellinus.... 
  Within his sunshine basked and buzzed and stung;
  And, now the shadow comes, off, like a fly—­
  A pestilent and stinking fly—­he goes!

But it is unpardonable to make even Nero say, “I have to rinse my mouth after her kiss.”

The fine qualities of the composition give the blemishes relief, and the material deserved that Mr. Story should work it up to its utmost possible perfection.

* * * * *

Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher.  With Letters and other Family Memorials.  Edited by the Survivor of her Family.  Boston:  Roberts Brothers.

There are in this work several elements of a gentle but unfailing interest, such as generally attaches to the class of books to which it belongs.  It gives us some delineations of bygone manners and social changes, glimpses of many more or less notable persons, and above all the record of a life which, without being in the usual sense of these terms eventful or distinguished, stands forth as one in a great degree self-determined and bearing a strong impress of individuality.  Mrs Fletcher was one of those women who easily become the central figures of the circles in which they move, and who owe this position, not to any transcendent qualities, but to the combined and irresistible influence of great personal charms, a high degree of mental vivacity, and those sympathetic and harmonizing qualities which it is so difficult to define, but which are equally distinct from mere amiability on the one hand and intense self-devotion on the other.  There seems to be in such characters a hint of heroic possibilities that would only be narrowed and despoiled of some of their charm if put to the test of action.  Lord Brougham compared Mrs. Fletcher to Madame Roland, but she had neither the soaring intellect nor the self-assertive tendencies that mark the representative