but convincing; in fact, her defence is extremely weak.  She does not even tell us that she did not make use of Chopin as a model.  That she drew a caricature and not a portrait will hardly be accepted as an excuse, nay, is sure to be regarded as the very head and front of her offending.  But George Sand had extraordinarily naive notions on this subject, notions which are not likely to be shared by many, at least not by many outside the fraternities of novelists and dramatists.  Having mentioned, in speaking of her grand-uncle the Abbe de Beaumont, that she thought of him when sketching the portrait of a certain canon in Consuelo, and that she had very much exaggerated the resemblance to meet the requirements of the romance, she remarks that portraits traced in this way are no longer portraits, and that those who feel offended on recognising themselves do an injustice both to the author and themselves.  “Caricature or idealisation,” she writes, “it is no longer the original model, and this model has little judgment if it thinks it recognises itself, if it becomes angry or vain on seeing what art or imagination has been able to make of it.”  This is turning the tables with a vengeance; and if impudence can silence the voice of truth and humanity, George Sand has gained her case.  In her account of the Lucrezia Floriani incident George Sand proceeds as usual when she is attacked and does not find it more convenient simply to declare that she will not condescend to defend herself—­namely, she envelops the whole matter in a mist of beautiful words and sentiments out of which issues—­and this is the only clearly-distinguishable thing—­her own saintly self in celestial radiance.  But notwithstanding all her arguments and explanations there remains the fact that Liszt and thousands of others, I one of them, read Lucrezia Floriani and were not a moment in doubt that Chopin was the prototype of Prince Karol.  We will not charge George Sand with the atrocity of writing the novel for the purpose of getting rid of Chopin; but we cannot absolve her from the sin of being regardless of the pain she would inflict on one who once was dear to her, and who still loved her ardently.  Even Miss Thomas, [footnote:  In George Sand, a volume of the “Eminent Women Series.”] who generally takes George Sand at her own valuation, and in this case too tries to excuse her, admits that in Lucrezia Floriani there was enough of reality interwoven to make the world hasten to identify or confound Chopin with Prince Karol, that Chopin, the most sensitive of mortals, could not but be pained by the inferences which would be drawn, that “perhaps if only as a genius he had the right to be spared such an infliction,” and that, therefore, “one must wish it could have appeared in this light to Madame Sand.”  This is a mild way of expressing disapproval of conduct that shows, to say the least, an inhuman callousness to the susceptibilities of a fellow-being.  And to speak of the irresistible