has won no place, nor has "Strathmore," nor has "Idalia," nor has "Puck," nor even "Chandos," pronounced as was the dawning change it exhibited. These works all mean a palæozoic age for Ouida: her extraordinary powers were yet struggling for worthier expression. They are valuable alike in their absurdities and their better revelations, though the latter shone fitful, indeterminate, and often distressingly transient. The superabundance of "color," the weight of adjective piled on adjective, the lavish display of an erudition as voluminous as it was sometimes erratic, the meretricious defects of style, the collet monté superfluity of rhetoric, the impossible and ludicrous descriptions of luxury,—all this has become with many of us in a manner comically classic. Ouida's early heroes, with their fleet Arabian steeds, their lordly lineage, their fabulous wealth or sentimentally picturesque poverty, their fatal fascinations for women and their deadly muscular developments for men,—Ouida's early heroes, I say, have grown as representative of the overwrought in fiction as those of Byron have grown representative of like indiscretion in poetry. Nor are these faults of her youth entirely outlived by Ouida. "Fine writing" is still occasionally her bane, though it becomes less and less so with each new book she now produces. Her vocabulary has always been as copious as the sunlight itself, and her style is at present a direct, flexible, and notably elegant one. She has been accused of "cramming," and of making a little knowledge do service for much. But only very illiterate people could believe such a masquerade possible with her. She is indisputably a woman of spacious and most diversified learning, though she has not always known either the art of modestly concealing this fact, or that of letting it speak spontaneously and judiciously for itself. Still, pedantry is not seldom the attribute of a greatly cultivated mind. We have seen this in the case of George Eliot, whose admirers will perhaps feel like mobbing me when they read that I think her genius in many ways inferior to that of Ouida. And yet I grant that to a very large extent she possesses what Ouida was for a long time almost totally without,—taste, artistic patience, and that surest of preservatives, a firm and chiselled style.
"Under Two Flags" may be said to have recorded a turning-point in this unique writer's career. It was full of the same tinselled and lurid hyperboles which had made so many readers of the extraordinary series hold up horrified hands in the past. But its gaudiness and opulence of language were suited to its Algerian locale, and the drowsy palms and deep-blue African skies of which it spoke to us accorded with the tropic tendencies of its phrases. It displayed a wondrous acquaintance, also, with military life in Algeria, and for this reason amazed certain observers of an altered mise en scène
