who wrote A Chain of Pearl, or a memorial of the peerless graces and heroic virtues of Queen Elizabeth, of glorious memory?  Where is Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden?  Where is the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I., and where is Anne Killigrew, maid of honour to the Duchess of York?  The Marchioness of Wharton, whose poems were praised by Waller; Lady Chudleigh, whose lines beginning—­

   Wife and servant are the same,
   But only differ in the name,

are very curious and interesting; Rachel Lady Russell, Constantia Grierson, Mary Barber, Laetitia Pilkington; Eliza Haywood, whom Pope honoured by a place in The Dunciad; Lady Luxborough, Lord Bolingbroke’s half-sister; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Lady Temple, whose poems were printed by Horace Walpole; Perdita, whose lines on the snowdrop are very pathetic; the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, of whom Gibbon said that ‘she was made for something better than a Duchess’; Mrs. Ratcliffe, Mrs. Chapone, and Amelia Opie, all deserve a place on historical, if not on artistic, grounds.  In fact, the space given by Mrs. Sharp to modern and living poetesses is somewhat disproportionate, and I am sure that those on whose brows the laurels are still green would not grudge a little room to those the green of whose laurels is withered and the music of whose lyres is mute.

* * * * *

One of the most powerful and pathetic novels that has recently appeared is A Village Tragedy by Margaret L. Woods.  To find any parallel to this lurid little story, one must go to Dostoieffski or to Guy de Maupassant.  Not that Mrs. Woods can be said to have taken either of these two great masters of fiction as her model, but there is something in her work that recalls their method; she has not a little of their fierce intensity, their terrible concentration, their passionless yet poignant objectivity; like them, she seems to allow life to suggest its own mode of presentation; and, like them, she recognises that a frank acceptance of the facts of life is the true basis of all modern imitative art.  The scene of Mrs. Woods’s story lies in one of the villages near Oxford; the characters are very few in number, and the plot is extremely simple.  It is a romance of modern Arcadia—­a tale of the love of a farm-labourer for a girl who, though slightly above him in social station and education, is yet herself also a servant on a farm.  True Arcadians they are, both of them, and their ignorance and isolation serve only to intensify the tragedy that gives the story its title.  It is the fashion nowadays to label literature, so, no doubt, Mrs. Woods’s novel will be spoken of as ‘realistic.’  Its realism, however, is the realism of the artist, not of the reporter; its tact of treatment, subtlety of perception, and fine distinction of style, make it rather a poem than a proces-verbal; and though it lays bare to us the mere misery of life, it suggests