should be studied by those who are investigating the question of wherein womanliness consists.  The view the poet takes of her is, we need hardly say, very different from that which Canon Liddon would entertain.  Yet it is none the less fine on this account, and we are glad that this old lady has been given a place in art.  The volume is, on the whole, delightful reading, and though not much can be said for lines like these: 

   There cometh from the West
   The timid starry bands,

still, the translations are in many instances most felicitous and their style most pleasing.

Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends, etc.  Translated by E. M. Edmonds. (Trubner and Co.)

OLIVIA AT THE LYCEUM

(Dramatic Review, May 30, 1885.)

Whether or not it is an advantage for a novel to be produced in a dramatic form is, I think, open to question.  The psychological analysis of such work as that of Mr. George Meredith, for instance, would probably lose by being transmuted into the passionate action of the stage, nor does M. Zola’s formule scientifique gain anything at all by theatrical presentation.  With Goldsmith it is somewhat different.  In The Vicar of Wakefield he seeks simply to please his readers, and desires not to prove a theory; he looks on life rather as a picture to be painted than as a problem to be solved; his aim is to create men and women more than to vivisect them; his dialogue is essentially dramatic, and his novel seems to pass naturally into the dramatic form.  And to me there is something very pleasurable in seeing and studying the same subject under different conditions of art.  For life remains eternally unchanged; it is art which, by presenting it to us under various forms, enables us to realise its many-sided mysteries, and to catch the quality of its most fiery-coloured moments.  The originality, I mean, which we ask from the artist, is originality of treatment, not of subject.  It is only the unimaginative who ever invents.  The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

Looking in this light at Mr. Wills’s Olivia, it seems to me a very exquisite work of art.  Indeed, I know no other dramatist who could have re-told this beautiful English tale with such tenderness and such power, neither losing the charm of the old story nor forgetting the conditions of the new form.  The sentiment of the poet and the science of the playwright are exquisitely balanced in it.  For though in prose it is a poem, and while a poem it is also a play.