bishop's chair, and
now, if a novelist attempt to clothe him in the garments of his time,
he splits them down the back.

It is in meeting this difficulty that Mrs. Woods seems to me to
display the courage and intelligence of a true artist. She is bound to
be praised by many for her erudition; but perhaps she will let me
thank her for having trodden upon her erudition. In the first volume
it threatened to overload and sink her. But no sooner does she begin
to catch the wind of her subject than she tosses all this superfluous
cargo overboard. From the point where passion creeps into the story
this learning is carried lightly and seems to be worn unconsciously.
Instead of cataloguing the age, she comprehends it.

To me the warmth and pathos she packs into her eighteenth-century
conversation, without modernizing it thereby, is something amazing.
For this alone the book would be notable; and it can be proved to come
of divination, simply because nothing exists from which she could have
copied it. More obvious, though not more wonderful, is her feminine
gift of rendering a scene vivid for us by describing it, not as it is,
but as it excites her own intelligence or feelings. Let me explain
myself: for it is the sorry fate of a book so interesting and
suggestive as _Esther Vanhomrigh_ to divert the critic from praise of
the writer to consider a dozen problems which the writer raises.

Women and "le don pittoresque."

Well, then, M. Jules Lemaitre has said somewhere--and with
considerable truth--that women when they write have not _le don
pittoresque_. By this he means that they do not strive to depict a
scene exactly as it strikes upon their senses, but as they perceive
it after testing its effect upon their emotions and experience.
Suppose now we have to describe a moonlit night in May. Mrs. Woods
begins as a man might begin, thus--

"The few and twinkling lights disappeared from the roadside
cottages. The full white moon was high in the cloudless deep of
heaven, and the sounds of the warm summer night were all about
their path; the splash of leaping fish, the sleepy chirrup of
birds disturbed by some night-wandering creature; the song of the
reed-warbler, the persistent churring of the night jar, and the
occasional hoot of the owl, far off on some ancestral tree."

Now all this, except, perhaps, the "ancestral" tree, is a direct
picture, and with it some men might stop. But no woman