The healthy school is played out in England; all that could be said has been said; the successors of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no ideal, and consequently no language; what can be more pudding than the language of Mr. Hardy, and he is typical of a dozen other writers, Mr. Besant, Mr. Murray, Mr. Crawford? The reason of this heaviness of thought and expression is that the avenues are closed, no new subject matter is introduced, the language of English fiction has therefore run stagnant. But if the realists should catch favour in England the English tongue may be saved from dissolution, for with the new subjects they would introduce, new forms of language would arise. * * * * * I wonder why murder is considered less immoral than fornication in literature? * * * * * I feel that it is almost impossible for the same ear to seize music so widely differing as Milton's blank verse and Hugo's alexandrines, and it seems to me especially strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even remotely to suspect, when they passionately declare that English blank verse is a more perfect and complete poetic instrument than French alexandrines, that the imperfections which they aver are inherent in the latter exist only in their British ears, impervious to a thousand subtleties. Mr. Matthew Arnold does not hesitate to say that the regular rhyming of the lines is monotonous. To my ear every line is different; there is as much variation in Charles V.'s soliloquy as in Hamlet's; but be this as it may, it is not unworthy of the inmates of Hanwell for critics to inveigh against _la, rime pleine_, that which is instinctive in the language as accent in ours, that which is the very genius of the language. But the principle has been exaggerated, deformed, caricatured until some of the most modern verse is little more than a series of puns--in art as in life the charm lies in the unexpected, and it is annoying to know that the only thought of _every_ poet is to couple _les murs_ with _des fruits trop mûrs_, and that no break in the absolute richness of sound is to be hoped for. Gustave Kahn whose beautiful volume "Les Palais Nomades" I have read with the keenest delight, was the first to recognise that an unfailing use of _la rime pleine_ might become cloying and satiating, and that, by avoiding it sometimes and markedly and maliciously choosing in preference a simple assonance, new and subtle music might be produced.