Was it, for example, indeed totally unconscious, the audacious paraphrase of Marie Bashkirtseff and her journal which constitutes the whole working material of the only passably interesting section of this wearisome compilation? But why should one ask? The whole book is nothing but a rifacimento of other and better books. Here it is Wuthering Heights, here it is George Eliot, here it is somebody else. To read it, is like drinking glass after glass of water stale and stained with the rinsings of many wines. In a few years the salt and turbid tide of British religious liberalism will have advanced a little, and then Robert Elsmere will be forgotten in the rapture of some other equally mediocre book which more or less expresses that little, and the general stupidity of existence will in no wise be diminished. Wuthering Heights, however, will still be to the good, and (though in a considerably lesser measure) so will Marie Bashkirtseff, and therein lies all the consolation possible to the disinterested friend of Literature, and his species.
Equally simple are the causes of the success of Mr. Hall Caine, whom we may take as another variant of the same species, and equally inevitable is his imminent doom. The spectacle is pathetic as well as absurd, because the unhappy man apparently looks upon himself and his work seriously He does
