Mr. Robert Buchanan is a type of artist that every age produces unfailingly: Catulle Mendès is his counterpart in France,--but the pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ-like face, and his fascinating fervour is more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with volumes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries about the dignity of art, and both have--well ... Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaudeville Theatre; he has written a novel, the less said about which the better--he has attacked men whose shoestrings he is not fit to tie, and having failed to injure them, he retracted all he said, and launched forth into slimy benedictions. He took Fielding's masterpiece, degraded it, and debased it; he wrote to the papers that Fielding was a genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby inferring that he was a much greater genius since he had sojourned in this Scotch house of literary ill-fame. Clarville, the author of "Madame Angot," transformed Madame Marneff into a virtuous woman; but he did not write to the papers to say that Balzac owed him a debt of gratitude on that account. The star of Miss Braddon has finally set in the obscure regions of servantgalism; Ouida and Rhoda Broughton continue to rewrite the books they wrote ten years ago; Mrs. Lynn Linton I have not read. The "Story of an African Farm" was pressed upon me. I found it sincere and youthful, disjointed but well-written; descriptions of sand-hills and ostriches sandwiched with doubts concerning a future state, and convictions regarding the moral and physical superiority of women: but of art nothing; that is to say, art as I understand it,--rhythmical sequence of events described with rhythmical sequence of phrase.