both, and cannot make up his mind between
them: and I for one hope he will keep up his practice at both: for his
experiments are most interesting, and in the course of them he is
giving us capital books. Of the two before me, _The God in the Car_
belongs to the same class as his earliest work--his _Father Stafford_,
for instance, a novel that did not win one-tenth of the notice it
deserved. It is practice at short range. It moves very close to real
life. Real people, of course, do not converse as briskly and wittily
as do Mr. Hope's characters: but these have nothing of the impossible
in them, and even in the whole business of Omofaga there is nothing
more fantastic than its delightful name. The book is genuinely tragic;
but the tragedy lies rather in what the reader is left to imagine than
in what actually occurs upon the stage. That it never comes to a more
explicit and vulgar issue stands not so much to the credit of the
heroine (as I suppose we must call Mrs. Dennison) as to the force of
circumstances as manipulated in the tactful grasp of Mr. Hope. Nor is
it to be imputed to him for a fault that the critical chapter xvii.
reminds us in half a dozen oddly indirect ways of a certain chapter in
_Richard Feverel_. The place, the situation, the reader's suspense,
are similar; but the actors, their emotions, their purposes are vastly
different. It is a fine chapter, and the page with which it opens is
the worst in the book--a solitary purple patch of "fine writing." I
observe without surprise that the reviewers--whose admiring attention
is seldom caught but by something out of proportion--have been
fastening upon it and quoting it ecstatically.

_The Indiscretion of the Duchess_ is the tale in Mr. Hope's second
manner--the manner of _The Prisoner of Zenda_. Story for story, it
falls a trifle sort of _The Prisoner of Zenda_. As a set-off, the
telling is firmer, surer, more accomplished. In each an aimless,
superficially cynical, but naturally amiable English gentleman finds
himself casually involved in circumstances which appeal first to his
sportsmanlike love of adventure, and so by degrees to his chivalry,
his sense of honor, and his passions. At first amused, then perplexed,
then nettled, then involved heart and soul, he is left to fight his
way through with the native weapons of his order--courage, tact,
honesty, wit, strength of self-sacrifice, aptitude for affairs. The
_donnee_ of these tales, their spirit, their po