on as this volume contains. When I
closed the volume it was with the feeling that Sara Bernhardt is surely
the greatest woman of the age; and I was fully resolved that I must see
her play at the first opportunity, no matter what the cost. And as for
Madame Columbier, why she isn't so bad, either! The flashes of lightning
in her swordplay are highly interesting. The book was born, as all good
books, because its mother could not help it. Behind every page and
between the lines you see the fevered toss of human emotion and hot
ambition--these women were rivals. There were digs and scratches,
bandied epithets in falsetto, and sounds like a piccolo played by a man
in distress, before all this; and these are not explained, so you have
to fill them in with your imagination. But the Bernhardt is the bigger
woman of the two. She goes her splendid pace alone, and all the other
woman can do is to bombard her with a book.

The excellence of Handel is shown in that he achieved the enmity of some
very good men. Read the "Spectator," and you will find its pages well
peppered with thrusts at "foreigners," and sweeping cross-strokes at
Italian Opera and all "bombastic beaters of the air, who smother harmony
with bursts of discord in the name of music."

These battles royal between the kings of art are not so far removed from
the battles of the beasts. Rosa Bonheur has pictured a duel to the death
between stallions; and that battle of the stags--horn-locked--with the
morning sun revealing Death as victor, by Landseer, is familiar to us
all. Then Landseer has another picture which he called "The Monarch,"
showing a splendid stag, solitary and alone, standing on a cliff,
overlooking the valley. There is history behind this stag. Before he
could command the scene alone, he had to vanquish foes; but in the main,
in some way, you feel that most of his battles have been bloodless and
he commands by divine right. The Divine Right of a King, if he be a
King, has its root in truth.

One mark of the genius of Handel is shown in the fact that he has
achieved a split and created a ruction in the Society of Scribblers. He
once cut Dean Swift dead at a fashionable gathering--the doughty Dean,
who delighted in making men and women alike crawl to him--and this won
him the admiration of Colley Cibber, who immortalized the scene in a
sonnet. People liked Handel, or they did not, and among the Old Guard
who stood by him, let these names, among others, be