So long as I have an eye to my own longevity and peace, I shall never put foot in Paris. Moreover, the place is painful, as having shaken to the base my smug opinion of myself. It taught me my moral ticklishness, and shrunk me into less than a cosmopolite; though I make puns again, I do so humbly, and out of a psychic experience. Nor must the item go unrecorded that I had a French ancestor, an unimportant personage remembered not then so much as since. He was born on the borders of Provence; what Paris was to him, or whether he ever beheld it, I know not. It is possible that he may have burned his fingers there, and that his bullying spirit imposed upon mine this fantastic attraction of repulsion, this irrational hatred of what I knew all the time to be the most animated, the most consistent, and the most beautiful city in the world. “Trilby” _By_ Louise Imogen Guiney “TRILBY” “TRILBY” is two things. It is a little, simple, light-hearted story, lop-sided, discursive, having breaks and patches; and it is also already a masterpiece _hors concours_, so that when you come before it, the only sage remark you can make is dumb-show: that is, you may with great propriety take off your hat. Its background is so treated that it takes rank as a new thing in English fiction. Others since Mürger have attempted to draw the life of the Quarter, but none with this blitheness and winning charm, not even Mr. Henry Harland (Sidney Luska) in his idyllic “Land of Love,” which deserves to be better known. The spirit of “Trilby” is the very essence of the best old English humor, as if Fielding, Steele, and Thackeray had collaborated upon it in Paradise (forgetting just a little the rules of their mundane grammar, the conditions of their mundane style!) and transfused into it their robust manly gayety and their understanding tenderness of heart. Indeed, its every page seems to breathe forth Thackeray’s darling axiom: “Fun is good; Truth is better; Love is best of all.” It is a capital illustration of the capital French thesis that a subject counts for nothing, but that the treatment of a subject counts for everything. Let the average readeress, a person of conventions, go through “Trilby” from cover to cover. Her attitude at the end is Mrs. Bagot’s own: affectionate and bewildered surrender. “Trilby” itself is what its heroine ingenuously calls the “altogether.” It is an elemental human book, staged without costumes, attractive for no spurious attribute, but only through its gentleness and candor. It constrains talk, only because it has so strengthened feeling.