e are nationalising the
great masters, let us remember that there is something we may find and
lose in a single Mantegna more important to us than all the galleries
in the world. The derelict 'Victory,' with her romantic lines, means
as much to the nation as the biggest Dreadnought in the world."

And we can imagine Mr. Shaw getting up to question the novelist. "Will
Mr. Wells explain to us how the State is going to preserve Marion's
colour? Does he propose to arrange sunset effects on Primrose Hill?
Will he describe the apparatus by which he intends to capture and
bottle the high air, and distribute it for public consumption? And
where are we to look for the something to be found in Mantegna's
pictures when he has been so unfortunate as to lose it?"

Mr. Wells, naturally enough, broke with the Fabian Society; and at
the same time, discovering the inadequacy of his remedy, broke with
the whole social order, resigned himself for a time to sheer
irritation, and took his revenge upon the world in _The New
Machiavelli_. He devoted his brilliant powers to satirising the whole
public life of Great Britain, in the same breath lampooning the public
persons with whom he had been personally associated, and defending
himself against certain personal charges which had been brought
against him.

It was an effective book. It occasioned not a little gossip,
excitement, scandal, and even heart-burning. Though the author
announced that the persons in the novel were composite characters, not
to be taken as likenesses of real persons, and though no doubt there
were scenes and conversations which he had invented and incidents
which he had transposed, nevertheless in many essentials the story was
photographic. Mr. Wells himself was never, like his hero Remington,
either at Cambridge or in Parliament, but he came under the same
educational, social, and political influences which determined
Remington's character and career. Remington's friends, who are exposed
in all the intimacy of private life to the public gaze, were once,
under other names, the friends of Mr. Wells. No one who has any
acquaintance with public personages in London can fail to identify
those apostles of social organisation, Mr. Bailey and his wife
Altiora. Equally transparent are the young Liberals, Edward and Willie
Crampton. If the novelist has caricatured these persons he has seen to
it that he has never distorted them out of recognition. The realism
with which he de