no value but to itself. Here is "aristocracy" in the last despairing gasps of self-consumption.
Emerson and Matthew Arnold in their day were often thought to be "tainted with aristocratic principles." But place their idea of culture beside Mrs. Gerould's and instantly you would take those prophets for demagogues, flatterers of the "rascal many." They were not, at any rate, afraid of their world. And they did not pretend that what they prescribed for the superior class would destroy the multitude. Culture they conceived of as the steadily strengthening bond between man and man in an ever larger and larger company able to satisfy its standards. For they conceived of culture not! as a thing, but as an enlightened and enlightening spirit, a spirit of wide embrace, exacting in its discipline, but like the great historic Church of Christendom, of catholic and charitable imagination, eager to enfold a converted world and, so, eminently adapted to the democratic societies of the future.
It is thirty years since I read Miss Alcott's stories and I doubt whether I should enjoy them now as much as I enjoy Mrs. Gerould's. But there is a charm in certain pages of her Journal, an "amenity," of an order which I seek in vain in the far more clever works of her suc-
