verhouse, the latest and strongest figure on its canvas, the accepted type of its most brilliant and defiant qualities. Readers of old-fashioned novels may remember a lachrymose story, in two closely printed volumes, which enjoyed an amazing popularity some twenty years ago, and which was called The Last of the Cavaliers. It had for its hero a perfectly impossible combination of virtues, a cross between the Chevalier Bayard and the Admirable Crichton, labeled Dundee, and warranted proof against all the faults and foibles of humanity. This automaton, who moved in a rarefied atmosphere through the whole dreary tale, performing noble deeds and uttering virtuous sentiments with monotonous persistency, embodied, we may presume, the author's conception of a character not generally credited with such superfluous excellence. It was a fine specimen of imaginative treatment, and not wholly unlike some very popular historic methods by which similar results are reached to-day. Quite recently, a despairing English critic, with an ungratified taste for realities, complained somewhat savagely that "a more intolerable embodiment of unrelieved excel-
