Of the two heroines, Lady Kitty is a better realization than Julie, who, to our mind quite failed to keep the novelist’s promise of intellectual brilliancy and social magnetism. It is really a wonderful and poignant impression conveyed by Mrs. Ward’s elaborate picture of Lady Kitty, frail and fair, passionate and weak, poetic and frivolous, sweet and perverse—with a lack of moral and mental balance which spells for us nothing less than insanity. For after all, we are disposed to question whether such a character is not properly a study in alienism rather than in feminine psychology. That she was not a responsible agent, but merely the unfortunate creature of her own impelling fancies and passions, is the view stressed by every implication of the author, and indeed, against the very shady record of Lady Kitty’s life can only be pleaded temperamental insanity and hereditary sin. An equally elaborate, but not so successful, piece of work is the presentation of William Ashe. He is depicted as a kind of Admirable Crichton—handsome, learned, amiable—a scholar, a statesman, and a social lion. “Religiously he was a skeptic, enormously interested in religion. Politically he was an aristocrat, enormously interested in liberty.” But with all the author’s keen analysis and clever descriptive phrases, this versatile and philosophical hero never becomes very real to our perceptions or sympathies. It would seem that his creator had fashioned and molded him carefully and perfectly, but had failed to breathe into him the breath of life. Mrs. Ward’s rich literary equipment is no less manifest in this novel than in her previous works, and her power to deal with the larger interests of life is undiminished. The old time English society novel in her hands has been expanded, dignified, transformed, into a serious and significant presentation of life and its problems. Her outlook on the world of thought, of affairs, and of men and women is technically informed and philosophically impartial; her talent is enormously efficient. Perhaps her remarkable ability was never better demonstrated than when she made in “Lady Rose’s Daughter” a deliberate bid for a wider and lower kind of popular favor. The new appeal, so marked in that book and in “The Marriage of William Ashe,” was so skilfully turned and has been so successful in enlarging the writer’s clientele, that as a literary _tour de force_, it challenges a kind of unwilling admiration. There seem to be lacking to her marvelous gifts and powers only the touch of spontaneity, the flash of dramatic fire. THE GEORGIANS. By Will N. Harben, author of “Abner Daniel,” “The Substitute,” etc. New York: Harper and Brother. Price, $1.50.