of call, and we should like to sit there
often. And the wine--we found no fault with the wine. It's an honest
tap, and a wholesome and a palatable, and here's the landlord's health
in it. But the magic vintage? Rubbish!

Mr. Anthony Hope has been so lucky as to please the public in two
styles. In the one _genre_ he has displayed an undoubted capacity,
marred here and there to some tastes by a not very defined seeming
of superciliousness, and in the other he has taken us into the most
agreeable regions of unrestrained romance in which English readers have
had leave to wander this many a day. He has caught the very tone of
simple-hearted sincerity in which his later stories demand to be told.
As an example of the adaptation of literary method to the exigencies
of narrative it would not be easy to light on anything better. It is a
little surprising that the trivial story and the trivial style of
'Mr. De Witt's Widow' should have come from the hand which gave us the
histories of the Princess Osra, and created the Kingdom of Ruritania.
The one kind of work is clever, and smart, and knowingly--rather
pretentiously--man-of-the-worldish. The other is large and simple, sweet
and credulous. Mr. Hope, from his latest pages, has breathed on a tired
and jaded time the breath of a pure and harmless fancy, and has earned
its thanks for that benefaction.

It has been seen that the art of fiction as practised at this hour
includes almost all known forms of romance, and that no school may be
said to have its own way to the exclusion of another. It has been seen,
too, that though this is not a day of pre-eminent greatness, we can
boast an astonishing industry and fertility. The output of literary work
has never been so large, nor has the average of excellence ever been so
equal or so high. It has been demonstrated--it is being demonstrated in
new instances two or three times a year--that literary talent is not at
all the uncommon and half-miraculous thing it was once supposed to be.

Genius is as rare as ever, and is likely to continue so, but talent
multiplies its appearances in full accordance with economic rules. No
age ever submitted so constantly as ours to be amused or soothed by the
romancer's art. The permission has opened the door to a great number
of capable, industrious, and workmanlike men and women, who have learnt
their business of amusement well. To the vast majority of us literature
is as much a trade as any of the accep