Your true life-story? 
   How utter, if they cannot guess—­not feel
      Your crowning glory? 
   This way.  Attend my words.  The rich, we know,
      Do into heaven
   Enter but hardly; to the poor, the low,
      God’s kingdom’s given. 
   Well, there’s another heaven—­a heaven on earth—­
      (That’s love’s fruition)
   Whereto a certain lack—­a certain dearth—­
      Gains best admission. 
   Here, too, she was too rich—­ah, God! if less
      Love had been lent her!—­
   Into the realm of human happiness
      These look—­not enter.

Well, here we have, if not quite an echo, at least a reminiscence of the metre of The Grammarian’s Funeral; and the peculiar blending together of lyrical and dramatic forms, seems essentially characteristic of Mr. Browning’s method.  Yet there is a distinct personal note running all through the poem, and true originality is to be found rather in the use made of a model than in the rejection of all models and masters.  Dans l’art comme dans la nature on est toujours fils de quelqu’un, and we should not quarrel with the reed if it whispers to us the music of the lyre.  A little child once asked me if it was the nightingale who taught the linnets how to sing.

Miss Chapman’s other poems contain a great deal that is interesting.  The most ambitious is The New Purgatory, to which the book owes its title.  It is a vision of a strange garden in which, cleansed and purified of all stain and shame, walk Judas of Cherioth, Nero the Lord of Rome, Ysabel the wife of Ahab, and others, around whose names cling terrible memories of horror, or awful splendours of sin.  The conception is fine, but the treatment is hardly adequate.  There are, however, some good strong lines in it, and, indeed, almost all of Miss Chapman’s poems are worth reading, if not for their absolute beauty, at least for their intellectual intention.

* * * * *

Nothing is more interesting than to watch the change and development of the art of novel-writing in this nineteenth century—­’this so-called nineteenth century,’ as an impassioned young orator once termed it, after a contemptuous diatribe against the evils of modern civilisation.  In France they have had one great genius, Balzac, who invented the modern method of looking at life; and one great artist, Flaubert, who is the impeccable master of style; and to the influence of these two men we may trace almost all contemporary French fiction.  But in England we have had no schools worth speaking of.  The fiery torch lit by the Brontes has not been passed on to other hands; Dickens has influenced only journalism; Thackeray’s delightful superficial philosophy, superb narrative power, and clever social satire have found no echoes; nor has Trollope left any direct successors behind him—­a fact which is not much to be regretted, however, as, admirable though Trollope undoubtedly is for rainy afternoons