style, and has a wonderful faculty of drawing in a few sentences the most lifelike portraits of social types and social exceptions.  Sir Jasper Broke and his sister, the Duke and Duchess of Cheviotdale, Lord and Lady Glenalmond, and Lord Baltimore, are all admirably drawn.  The ‘novel of high life,’ as it used to be called, has of late years fallen into disrepute.  Instead of duchesses in Mayfair, we have philanthropic young ladies in Whitechapel; and the fashionable and brilliant young dandies, in whom Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton took such delight, have been entirely wiped out as heroes of fiction by hardworking curates in the East End.  The aim of most of our modern novelists seems to be, not to write good novels, but to write novels that will do good; and I am afraid that they are under the impression that fashionable life is not an edifying subject.  They wish to reform the morals, rather than to portray the manners of their age.  They have made the novel the mode of propaganda.  It is possible, however, that Dorinda points to some coming change, and certainly it would be a pity if the Muse of Fiction confined her attention entirely to the East End.

* * * * *

The four remarkable women whom Mrs. Walford has chosen as the subjects of her Four Biographies from ‘Blackwood’ are Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Fry, Hannah More, and Mary Somerville.  Perhaps it is too much to say that Jane Taylor is remarkable.  In her day she was said to have been ’known to four continents,’ and Sir Walter Scott described her as ’among the first women of her time’; but no one now cares to read Essays in Rhyme, or Display, though the latter is really a very clever novel and full of capital things.  Elizabeth Fry is, of course, one of the great personalities of this century, at any rate in the particular sphere to which she devoted herself, and ranks with the many uncanonised saints whom the world has loved, and whose memory is sweet.  Mrs. Walford gives a most interesting account of her.  We see her first a gay, laughing, flaxen-haired girl, ‘mightily addicted to fun,’ pleased to be finely dressed and sent to the opera to see the ‘Prince,’ and be seen by him; pleased to exhibit her pretty figure in a becoming scarlet riding-habit, and to be looked at with obvious homage by the young officers quartered hard by, as she rode along the Norfolk lanes; ‘dissipated’ by simply hearing their band play in the square, and made giddy by the veriest trifle:  ‘an idle, flirting, worldly girl,’ to use her own words.  Then came the eventful day when ‘in purple boots laced with scarlet’ she went to hear William Savery preach at the Meeting House.  This was the turning-point of her life, her psychological moment, as the phrase goes.  After it came the era of ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ of the drab gown and the beaver hat, of the visits to Newgate and the convict ships, of the work of rescuing the outcast and seeking the lost.  Mrs. Walford quotes the following interesting account of the famous interview with Queen Charlotte at the Mansion-House: