But when we remember the admirable and satisfying events in _Treasure Island_, or the well-sustained interest of _Kidnapped_, it seems incredible that Mr. Stevenson, of all novelists, should have succeeded in telling a lifeless story of adventure. As for _Nada the Lily_, its incidents are too monotonously painful to do more than distress the reader. I am inclined to think that a greater number of people die in the course of this tale than in all the rest of English fiction, exclusive of Mr. Haggard’s other novels. They die singly, in pairs, in groups, in armies, in whole tribes. They die in battle, by fire, by torture, by starvation, at the hands of pitiless slaughterers, and under the fangs of ghost wolves. They die for every imaginable cause, and under every conceivable circumstance. To keep the death-rate of such a story would be like keeping the death-rate of the Deluge. There is the same comprehensive and all-embracing destruction. This maybe true to Zulu history—in fact, Mr. Haggard tells us as much in his preface to “Nada,” and few people are in a position to dispute the point; but it is radically false to art, and impairs the natural vigor of the tale. While one tragedy may be sombre and impressive, a dozen are apt to be fatiguing, and half a hundred border closely on the burlesque. Chaka, “a Napoleon and Tiberius in one,” reminds the irreverent reader irresistibly of the Queen in _Alice in Wonderland_, who is all the time saying, “Off with his head!” and ordering everybody to execution; the only difference being that the Queen’s victims turn up blandly in the next chapter, and Chaka’s never reappear. He it is who slays Unandi his mother, Baleka his wife, all his children save one, all his enemies, and most of his friends. Then his turn comes—and none too soon—to be murdered, and Dingaan his brother, “who had the fierce heart of Chaka without its greatness,” sets to work systematically to kill everybody who chances to be left. By the time he, too, is flung over the cliff to die, Mopo and Umslopogaas alone survive; the first because he has to tell the tale—after which he promptly expires—and the second because he has already been slain in battle during the progress of another story. The most curious thing about this wholesale devastation is that Mr. Haggard apparently deplores it as much as the rest of us. “It would have been desirable to introduce some gayer and more happy incidents,” he admits in his preface, “_but it has not been possible_.” Why has it not been possible, we wonder? It is the privilege of a novelist to select or discard material according to his good judgment. He is not writing a history; he is telling a story. He is not chronicling events; he is weaving a romance. He is an artist, not a recorder; and in the choice as well as in the use of material lies the test of unblemished art.