Black beast for bete noire is really abominable.

The object of my letter, however, is not to point out the deficiencies of
Mr. Saintsbury's style, but to express my surprise that his article
should have been admitted into the pages of a magazine like Macmillan's.
Surely it does not require much experience to know that such an article
is a disgrace even to magazine literature.

George Borrow. By George Saintsbury. (Macmillan's Magazine, January
1886.)

ONE OF MR. CONWAY'S REMAINDERS

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1886.)

Most people know that in the concoction of a modern novel crime is a more
important ingredient than culture. Mr. Hugh Conway certainly knew it,
and though for cleverness of invention and ingenuity of construction he
cannot be compared to M. Gaboriau, that master of murder and its
mysteries, still he fully recognised the artistic value of villainy. His
last novel, A Cardinal Sin, opens very well. Mr. Philip Bourchier, M.P.
for Westshire and owner of Redhills, is travelling home from London in a
first-class railway carriage when, suddenly, through the window enters a
rough-looking middle-aged man brandishing a long-lost marriage
certificate, the effect of which is to deprive the right honourable
member of his property and estate. However, Mr. Bourchier, M.P., is
quite equal to the emergency. On the arrival of the train at its
destination, he invites the unwelcome intruder to drive home with him
and, reaching a lonely road, shoots him through the head and gives
information to the nearest magistrate that he has rid society of a
dangerous highwayman.

Mr. Bourchier is brought to trial and triumphantly acquitted. So far,
everything goes well with him. Unfortunately, however, the murdered man,
with that superhuman strength which on the stage and in novels always
accompanies the agony of death, had managed in falling from the dog-cart
to throw the marriage certificate up a fir tree! There it is found by a
worthy farmer who talks that conventional rustic dialect which, though
unknown in the provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi
melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous
young man who succeeds in blackmailing Mr. Bourchier and in marrying his
daughter. Mr. Bourchier suffers tortures from excess of chloral and of
remorse; and there is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind, that kind
which Mr. Conway may justly be said to have invented and th