he is diverting himself at our expense, and pluming a smile of his own, more sapless than succulent, over the naïve simplicity of the public. Perhaps it is a yearning after subtlety rather than a spirit of uncurbed humor which prompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo's "dark Renaissance face perplexed with an incipient laugh;" but really a very interesting and improving little paper might be written on the extraordinary laughs and smiles which cheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modern analytic fiction. "Correctness, that humble merit of prose," has been snubbed into a recognition of her insignificance. She is as tame as a woman with only one head and two arms amid her more striking and richly endowed sisters in the museum.
"A language long employed by a delicate and critical society," says Mr. Walter Bagehot, "is a treasure of dexterous felicities;" and to awaken the literary conscience to its forgotten duty of guarding this treasure is the avowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of another stylist, less understood and less appreciated, Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are scantily rewarded in an age which has but little in-
