. You imagine the gentlemen in
that Utopia moving gracefully--with beautifully trimmed nails and
beards--about the most elegant and ravishing of ladies, their charm
greatly enhanced by the _pince-nez_, that is in universal wear. They all
speak not Esperanto--but Greek, which strikes one as a little out of the
picture--and all being more or less wealthy and pretty women and
handsome men, "as common as blackberries" and as available, "human
desire rushed with all its might towards the only field that remained
open to it",--politics. From that it was presently turned back again by
a certain philosophical financier, who, most delightfully, secured his
work for ever, as the reader may learn in detail, by erecting a statue
of Louis Philippe in wrought aluminium against any return of the
flood--and then what remained? The most brilliant efflorescence of
poetry and art!

One does not quite know how far M. Tarde is in this first part of his
story jesting at his common countrymen's precisions and finalities and
unenterprising, exact arrangements, and how far he is sharing them.
Throughout he seems to assume that men can really make finished plans,
and carry them out, and settle things for ever, and so assure us this
state of elegant promenading among the arts, whereas the whole charm and
interest of making plans and carrying out, lies to the more typical kind
of Englishman, in his ineradicable, his innate, instinctive conviction,
that he will, try as he may, never carry them out at all, but something
else adventurously and happily unexpected and different. M. Tarde gives
his world the unexpected, but it comes, not insidiously as a unique
difference in every individual and item concerned, but from without.
Just as Humanity, handsome and charming, has grouped itself pleasantly,
rationally, and in the best of taste for ever in its studios, in its
_salons_, at its little green tables, at its _tables d'hote_, in its
_cabinets particuliers_--the sun goes out!

In the idea of that solar extinction there are extraordinary imaginative
possibilities, and M. Tarde must have exercised considerable restraint
to prevent their running away with him and so jarring with the ironical
lightness of his earlier passages. The conception of the sun seized in a
mysterious, chill grip and flickering from hue to hue in the skies of a
darkened, amazed and terrified world, could be presented in images of
stupendous majesty and splendour. There arise vision