We have spoken of her humour.  Those who would see a sample of it are referred to her description of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and this piece of pungent fun may be profitably read in contrast with her grim story of Gladys Leonora Pratt.  In that story some of the writer’s saddest experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it.  Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting.  “It might,” she said, “be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage.”

She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance, on which she became an acknowledged authority.  She was less well known, but not less effective, as a reviewer—­no one ever dissected Charlotte Yonge so justly—­and she excelled in personal description.  Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary Coleridge, and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization.  All her literary work was based on a wide and strong foundation of generous culture.  German was to her a second mother-tongue, and she lectured delightfully on Faust.  Though she spoke of herself as talking “fluent and incomprehensible bad French,” she was steeped in French scholarship.  She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a great deal of Italian.  The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted were a motley crowd—­Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, “Mark Rutherford” and Samuel Butler, Fenelon and Renan and Anatole France.  Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine.  In addressing some young girls she said:  “We all think a great deal of the importance of opening our windows and airing our rooms.  I wish we thought as much of airing our imaginations.  To me poetry is quite like that.  It is like opening the window daily, and looking out and letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little room; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more uncomfortable than I can tell you.”  She might have put the case more strongly; for poetry, and music, and painting, and indeed all art at its highest level, made a great part of her religion.  Her family had long ago conformed to the Church of England, in which she was brought up; but she never shook off her essential Judaism.  She had no sympathy with rites or ordinances, creeds or dogmas, and therefore outward conformity to the faith of her forefathers would have been impossible to her; but she looked with reverent pride on the tombs in the Jewish cemetery at Prague.  “It gave me a strange feeling to stand at the tombstone of our tribe—­900 A.D.  The oldest scholar’s grave is 600 A.D., and Heaven knows how many great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten.  The wind and the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all