familiar with its meanest impulse, its narrowest spite, resembles being seated by a person of repulsive physiognomy in a chamber lined with mirrors. The reduplications become unbearable to us, till we take the only feasible course for avoiding them: we go into another apartment. Still, in the present case, I did not go into another apartment; I finished "Friendship" and received from it an impression as vivid disagreeable. C'est le ton qui fait la musique, and this story, notwithstanding its eternity of repetitions, appeared to me told in a querulous, railing voice which robbed it of charm. But it evinces a most undeniable improvement in method. The sentences are terser and crisper than in those other adolescent novels, and the syntax is no longer straggling and hazardous. Of a certain redundancy Ouida has never wholly rid herself. The effort to do so is manifest in her later books, but it still remains a weakness with her to tell us the same thing a number of times and with only a comparative alteration of phraseology. Still, no one—not even Balzac himself—has a more succinct, dry, poignant way of putting epigram. It seems to me that she is without humor; her fun inevitably stings as wit alone can do; that soft phosphorescent play of geniality which would try to set its reflex gleam in the stony gaze of a gorgon, appears quite unknown to her. She has been wise, too, in not cultivating humor, for it is something which must fall upon a writer from heaven: he might as well try and train himself into having blue eyes instead of black. But Ouida has trained many of her qualities, and the self-search with which she has done so has betokened the most scourge-like rigors. The novelist in her is to me all a matter of talent vigilantly guarded and nurtured; the poetic part of her—the part to which we are indebted for three supreme achievements—could not have helped delivering its beautiful message. Afterward Ouida remembered that she was somebody quite outside of what one would call a genius,—that she was a woman of enormously versatile information, and that the possibility of her writing novels which would excite a great deal of public attention could scarcely be overestimated. Beyond doubt she had now reached a state of dexterity as regarded mere craftsmanship which thoroughly eclipsed the crudity of former times. But just as she had been raw and experimental in a way quite her own, so was she now adroit, self-restrained, and professional with a similar freshness.
"Moths" came next, and was a hook sought and commented upon, admired and execrated, from St. Petersburg to San Francisco. Of all her novels, this is perhaps the one which has brought her the greatest number of readers in what may be set down as the third period of her singular celebrity. It is filled with the most drastic interest for even the most jaded and ennuyé examiner. The story is the perfection of
