Mr. Andrew Lang, who enjoys upon all occasions the courage of his convictions, has, in one of those pleasant papers, “At the Sign of the Ship,” given utterance to a sentiment so shockingly at variance with the prevalent theory of fiction, that the reader is divided between admiration for his boldness and a vague surprise that a man should speak such words and live. There is a cheerfulness, too, about Mr. Lang’s heterodoxy, a smiling ignorance of his own transgression, that warms our hearts and weakens our upbraiding. “The old simple scheme,” he says, “in which you had a real unmitigated villain, a heroine as pure as snow or flame, and a crowd of good ordinary people, gave us more agreeable reading, and reading not, I think, more remote from truth, than is to be found in Dr. Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ or in his _Pillars of Society_.” Now to support such a statement would be unscrupulous; to condemn it, dispiriting; but I wonder if the “real unmitigated villain” is quite so simple a product as Mr. Lang appears to imagine. May not his absence from literature be owing as much to the limitations as to the disregard of modern realists? Is he, in truth, so easily drawn as to be unworthy of their subtle and discriminating pens? Is Sir Giles Overreach a mere child’s toy in comparison with Consul Bernick, and is Brian de Bois-Guilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tönnesen and Oswald Alving? A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development. Mrs. Pennell has told us the story of some old Venetian witches, who were converted from their dark ways, and taught the charms of peace and godliness; but who would desire or credit the conversion of a witch? The potency of evil lies within her to the end; and when, by a few muttered words, she can raise a hell storm on the ocean; when her eye’s dim fire can wither the strength of her enemy; or when, with a lock of hair and a bit of wax, she can consume him with torturing pain, who will welcome her neighborly advances? The proper and artistic end of a witch is at the stake—blue flames curling up to heaven, and a handful of gray ashes scattered to the wind; or, by the working of a stronger spell, she may be stiffened into stone, and doomed to stand forever on some desolate moor, where, underneath starless skies, her evil feet have strayed; or perhaps that huge black cat, her sinister attendant, has completed his ninth year of servitude to nine successive witches, and, by virtue of the power granted him at their expiration, he may whisk her off bodily on St. John’s Eve, to offer her a living holocaust to Satan. These are possibilities in strict sympathy with her character and history, if not