of “The Slavonic Menace to Europe.”  It opens with a panegyric on the authoress:  “She has mastered our language with conspicuous success; she expostulates as easily as she reproaches, and she exhibits as much facility in barbing shafts of satire as in framing specious excuses for daring acts of diplomacy.”  It insists on the high esteem felt for her by both the Russian and Austrian governments, telling with much humour an anecdote of Count Beust, the Prime Minister of Austria during her residence in Vienna.  The Count, after meeting her at a dinner party at the Turkish Embassy, composed a set of verses in her honour, and gave them to her, but she forgot to mention them to her brother-in-law.  The Prime Minister, encountering the latter, asked his opinion of the verses; and the ambassador was greatly amazed at knowing nothing of the matter. {23} From amenities towards the authoress, the article passes abruptly to hostile criticism of the book; declares it to be proscribed in Russia as mischievous, and to have precipitated a general war by keeping up English interest in Servian rebellion.  It sneers in doubtful taste at the lady’s learning: 

“sit non doctissima conjux, Sit nox cum somno, sit sine lite dies;”

denounces the Slavs as incapable of being welded into a nation, urging that their independence must destroy Austria-Hungary, a consummation desired by Madame Novikoff, with her feline contempt for “poor dear Austria,” but which all must unite to prevent if they would avert a European war.

How could one clear harp, men asked themselves as they read, have produced so diverse tones?  The riddle is solved when we learn that the first part only was from Kinglake’s pen:  having vindicated his friend’s ability and good faith, her right to speak and to be heard attentively, he left the survey of her views, with which he probably disagreed, to the originally assigned reviewer.  The article, Madame Novikoff tells us in the “Nouvelle Revue,” was received avec une stupefaction unanime.  It formed the general talk for many days, was attributed to Lord Salisbury, was supposed to have been inspired by Prince Gortschakoff.  The name standing against it in Messrs. Murray’s books, as they kindly inform me, is that of a writer still alive, and better known now than then, but they never heard that Kinglake had a hand in it; the editor would seem to have kept his secret even from the publishers.  Kinglake sent the article in proof to the lady; hoped that the facts he had imparted and the interpolations he had inserted would please her; he could have made the attack on Russia more pointed had he written it; she would think the leniency shows a fault on the right side; he did not know the writer of this latter part.  He begged her to acquaint her friends in Moscow what an important and majestic organ is “The Quarterly,” how weighty therefore its laudation of herself.  She recalls his bringing her soon afterwards an article