classes and all people, I am now given to understand, are of supreme interest to the loving student of human nature, and it is a "narrow conservatism"—chilling phrase—that seeks to limit the artist's field of action. But as limiting the artist's field of action is practically impossible, and not often essayed, it is hard to understand what the respective schools of fiction find to fight over, and why this new battle of the books should be raging as fiercely as if there were any visible cause of war. It is not an orderly and well-appointed battle, either, confined to the ranks of critics and reviewers, but a free skirmish, where everybody who has written a novel rushes in and plays an active part. Conflicting opinions rattle around our heads like hail, and the voice of the peace-maker,—Mr. Andrew Lang,—protesting that all schools are equally good, if the scholars are equal to their tasks, is lost in the universal clamor. The only point on which any two sharpshooters appear to agree is in laying the blame for the "unmanly timidity of English fiction"—a timidity not always so apparent as it might be—on the shoulders of women, who, it seems, will have all novels modeled to
