given by him, is that the spectacles in question were intended to represent Mrs. Kingsford’s remarkable faculty of intuitional and interpretative perception.  For a spiritual message fraught with such meaning, the mere form of this dream seems to me somewhat ignoble, and I cannot say that I like the blending of the postman with St. John the Baptist.  However, from a psychological point of view, these dreams are interesting, and Mrs. Kingsford’s book is undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature of the mysticism of the nineteenth century.

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The Romance of a Shop, by Miss Amy Levy, is a more mundane book, and deals with the adventures of some young ladies who open a photographic studio in Baker Street to the horror of some of their fashionable relatives.  It is so brightly and pleasantly written that the sudden introduction of a tragedy into it seems violent and unnecessary.  It lacks the true tragic temper, and without this temper in literature all misfortunes and miseries seem somewhat mean and ordinary.  With this exception the book is admirably done, and the style is clever and full of quick observation.  Observation is perhaps the most valuable faculty for a writer of fiction.  When novelists reflect and moralise, they are, as a rule, dull.  But to observe life with keen vision and quick intellect, to catch its many modes of expression, to seize upon the subtlety, or satire, or dramatic quality of its situations, and to render life for us with some spirit of distinction and fine selection—­this, I fancy, should be the aim of the modern realistic novelist.  It would be, perhaps, too much to say that Miss Levy has distinction; this is the rarest quality in modern literature, though not a few of its masters are modern; but she has many other qualities which are admirable.

* * * * *

Faithful and Unfaithful is a powerful but not very pleasing novel.  However, the object of most modern fiction is not to give pleasure to the artistic instinct, but rather to portray life vividly for us, to draw attention to social anomalies, and social forms of injustice.  Many of our novelists are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-tellers, earnest sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life.  The heroine, or rather martyr, of Miss Margaret Lee’s story is a very noble and graciously Puritanic American girl, who is married at the age of eighteen to a man whom she insists on regarding as a hero.  Her husband cannot live in the high rarefied atmosphere of idealism with which she surrounds him; her firm and fearless faith in him becomes a factor in his degradation.  ‘You are too good for me,’ he says to her in a finely conceived scene at the end of the book; ’we have not an idea, an inclination, or a passion in common.  I’m sick and tired of seeming to live up to a standard that is entirely beyond my reach and my desire.  We make each other miserable!  I can’t pull you down, and for ten years you