phrase and epithet has its drawbacks as well as its virtues.  And yet, when all is said, what wonderful prose it is, with its subtle preferences, its fastidious purity, its rejection of what is common or ordinary!  Mr. Pater has the true spirit of selection, the true tact of omission.  If he be not among the greatest prose writers of our literature he is, at least, our greatest artist in prose; and though it may be admitted that the best style is that which seems an unconscious result rather than a conscious aim, still in these latter days when violent rhetoric does duty for eloquence and vulgarity usurps the name of nature, we should be grateful for a style that deliberately aims at perfection of form, that seeks to produce its effect by artistic means and sets before itself an ideal of grave and chastened beauty.

Imaginary Portraits.  By Walter Pater, M.A., Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. (Macmillan and Co.)

A GOOD HISTORICAL NOVEL

(Pall Mall Gazette, August 8, 1887.)

Most modern Russian novelists look upon the historical novel as a faux genre, or a sort of fancy dress ball in literature, a mere puppet show, not a true picture of life.  Yet their own history is full of such wonderful scenes and situations, ready for dramatist or novelist to treat of, that we are not surprised that, in spite of the dogmas of the ecole naturaliste, Mr. Stephen Coleridge has taken the Russia of the sixteenth century as the background for his strange tale.  Indeed, there is much to be said in favour of a form remote from actual experience.  Passion itself gains something from picturesqueness of surroundings; distance of time, unlike distance of space, makes objects larger and more vivid; over the common things of contemporary life there hangs a mist of familiarity that often makes their meaning obscure.  There are also moments when we feel that but little artistic pleasure is to be gained from the study of the modern realistic school.  Its works are powerful but they are painful, and after a time we tire of their harshness, their violence and their crudity.  They exaggerate the importance of facts and underrate the importance of fiction.  Such, at any rate, is the mood—­and what is criticism itself but a mood?—­produced in us by a perusal of Mr. Coleridge’s Demetrius.  It is the story of a young lad of unknown parentage who is brought up in the household of a Polish noble.  He is a tall, fair-looking youth, by name Alexis, with a pride of bearing and grace of manner that seem strange in one of such low station.  Suddenly he is recognised by an exiled Russian noble as Demetrius, the son of Ivan the Terrible who was supposed to have been murdered by the usurper Boris.  His identity is still further established by a strange cross of seven emeralds that he wears round his neck, and by a Greek inscription in his book of prayers which discloses the secret