unjust to them, when they fail to deify their weaknesses.  No passion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.  Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the microscope too often.  Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a woman.  When society is aware that you think it a flock of geese, it revenges itself by hissing loudly behind your back.

Of descriptions of scenery and art we have, of course, a large number, and it is impossible not to recognise the touch of the real Ouida manner in the following: 

It was an old palace:  lofty, spacious, magnificent, and dull.  Busts of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes stretching out gaunt arms into the darkness, ivories brown with age, worn brocades with gold threads gleaming in them, and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of dead gods, were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight.  As he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale as the Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless like the statue of the wounded Love, came before his sight out of the darkness.  It was that of Gladys.

It is a manner full of exaggeration and overemphasis, but with some remarkable rhetorical qualities and a good deal of colour.  Ouida is fond of airing a smattering of culture, but she has a certain intrinsic insight into things and, though she is rarely true, she is never dull.  Guilderoy, with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities, which are greater, is a book to be read.

Guilderoy.  By Ouida. (Chatto and Windus.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES—­VI

(Woman’s World, June 1889.)

A writer in the Quarterly Review for January 1874 says: 

No literary event since the war has excited anything like such a sensation in Paris as the publication of the Lettres a une Inconnue.  Even politics became a secondary consideration for the hour, and academicians or deputies of opposite parties might be seen eagerly accosting each other in the Chamber or the street to inquire who this fascinating and perplexing ‘unknown’ could be.  The statement in the Revue des Deux Mondes that she was an Englishwoman, moving in brilliant society, was not supported by evidence; and M. Blanchard, the painter, from whom the publisher received the manuscripts, died most provokingly at the very commencement of the inquiry, and made no sign.  Some intimate friends of Merimee, rendered incredulous by wounded self-love at not having been admitted to his confidence, insisted that there was no secret to tell; their hypothesis being that the Inconnue was a myth, and the letters a romance, with which some petty details of actual life had been interwoven to keep up the mystification.

But an artist like Merimee would not have left his work in so unformed a state, so defaced by repetitions, or with such a want of proportion between the parts.  The Inconnue was undoubtedly a real person, and her letters in answer to those of Merimee have just been published by Messrs. Macmillan under the title of An Author’s Love.