most hopefully paramount in all that she did. If "Folle-Farine" had been her first book instead of her sixth or seventh, it would have made even the English blood that she has more than once declared so sluggish, tingle with glad appreciation of its loveliness. The change in her was for a time absolute and thorough. "Folle-Farine" was the story of a despised outcast girl, ignorant and unlettered, yet with a soul quick to estimate and treasure the worth and meaning of beauty wherever found. It is all something which the realists would pull long faces or giggle at as hopelessly "highfalutin." But then the realists, when they ride their hobby with a particularly martial air, are inclined quite to trample all poetry below its hooves. I don't know how well the story of "Folle-Farine" would please some of Balzac's successors, but I am sure that he himself would have delighted in it. The girl's infancy among the gypsies and subsequent fierce persecution at the hands of her grandfather, Claudis Flamma, as one devil-begotten and loathsome, are treated with an intensity bordering on the painful. But through all the youthful anguish and martyrdom of "Folle-Farine" there flows a charming current of idyllic feeling. Such passages as these, stamped with the individuality of Ouida, meet us on every page: "In one of the most fertile and fair districts of Northern France there was a little Norman town, very, very old, and beautiful exceedingly by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvellous galleries and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence and its color, and its rich still life. Its centre was a great cathedral, noble as York or Chartres; a cathedral whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose innumerable towers and pinnacles were all pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market-boats and for corn-barges, stole through the place to the sea, lapping as it went the wooden piles of the houses, and reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, the hues of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of the dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement-cluster of carnations, the Laughing face of a girl leaning out to smile on her lover."
This certainly is not what we call compact writing; there is none of that neatness and trimness about it which bespeak the deliberative pen or the compunctious eraser. But what a sensuous and winsome poetic effect does it produce! Few writers ear, afford the loose clauses, the random laissez-aller, of Ouida. She sometimes abuses her assumed privilege, even in her most authentic moments,—those, I mean, of pure imagination. But it is then that the superabundance of her diction and its careless yet shining fluency hardly ever lose their attractiveness. It is then that the prolixity to which I have before referred is an attribute
