istration,—all these are the old materials and manœuvres of "Strathmore" and "Idalia," but presented with tenfold more adroitness and savoir-faire. The secret of reading "Wanda" with the keenest relish for its exuberant ardors must lie in complete forgetfulness of life as it is and pious acceptance of life as it might be. But this is the test by which nearly all romance is tried. I have no space to treat at length of "Princess Napraxine" and its sequel " Othmar ;" but if space were broadly allowed me I could state of them no more and no less than I have already stated of "Wanda." Princess Napraxine herself is a silly and patience-taxing person. Ouida's enemies must have exulted in her as "immoral," which she indeed truly would be were she not so transparently légère. The chief pity is that so fine a fellow as Othmar should have done anything except disdain her. But both these two last novels teem with pages of description, reflection, tenderness, sweetness, and pathos which make the fact doubly sad that Princess Napraxine (a pedant, a prig, and a strutting combination of silliness and bad manners) should ever have been summoned to blot and mar them by her paltry charlatanisms.
The isolated position held by Ouida in an age when principles and theories essentially opposite to her own have seemingly captured the world of letters, would of itself point to endowments both rare and sturdy. That she has pushed her way into renown against obstacles which were often all the more stubborn because they were of her own rearing, is a matter for serious inquiry and reflection; but that she should have forced from certain able contemporaries who originally satirized and flouted her, the respect and homage which we pay to transcendent competency, is a still more significant truth. It means that Ouida must mount to her place of deserved state in spite of faults which would shape for many another writer stairways with a wholly different direction. But there has seldom been a writer whose virtues and vices were so inextricably blended. For example, the very people in her stories of fashionable society who conduct themselves with the least lucid common sense perpetually spice their repartees and railleries with a most engaging wit. We may not sympathize with what they say, but we are keenly amused by their modes of saying it. Disraeli, whom I believe Ouida sincerely admires as a novelist, possesses all her love for palatial filigree and porphyry; yet he has nothing of her sprightliness, crispness, and verve when telling us of the bores, the simpletons, and the few passably bright people who make up "society."
In more than a single way Ouida is behind her time,—a time over whose rather barren-looking levels of analysis and formulation she flings the one large light of romance now visible. In this latter respect
