Her books are devoid of charm. One does not have to compare her with the great masters to feel this deficiency; it would not be fair to compare her with Thackeray. But if we select among all the novelists of real distinction the one whom, perhaps, she most closely approaches,--Anthony Trollope,--the enormous distance between _Diana Mallory_ and _Framley Parsonage_ is instantly manifest. We think of Trollope with a glow of reminiscent delight; but although Trollope and Mrs. Ward talk endlessly on much the same range of subject-matter, how far apart they really are! Mrs. Ward's books are crammed with politicians and clergymen, who keep the patient reader informed on modern aspects of political and religious thought; but the difficulty is that they substitute phrases for ideas. Mrs. Ward knows all the political and religious cant of the day; she is familiar with the catch-words that divide men into hostile camps; but in all these dreary pages of serious conversation there is no real illumination. She completely lacks the art that Trollope possessed, of making ordinary people attractive. But to find out the real distance that separates her productions from literature, one should read, let us say, _The Marriage of William Ashe_ and then take up _Pride and Prejudice_. The novels of Mrs. Ward bear about the same relation to first-class fiction that maps and atlases bear to great paintings. This lack of charm that I always feel in reading Mrs. Ward's books (and I have read them all) is owing not merely to the lack of humour. It is partly due to what seems to be an almost total absence of freshness, spontaneity, and originality. Mrs. Ward works like a well-trained and high-class graduate student, who is engaged in the preparation of a doctor's thesis. Her discussions of socialism, her scenes in the House of Commons and on the Terrace, her excursions to Italy, her references to political history, her remarks on the army, her disquisitions on theology, her pictures of campaign riots, her studies of defective drainage, her representations of the labouring classes,--all these are "worked up" in a scholarly and scientific manner; there is the modern passion for accuracy, there is the German completeness of detail,--there is, in fact, everything except the breath of life. She works in the descriptive manner, from the outside in--not in the inspired manner which goes with imagination, sympathy, and genius. She is not only a student, she is a journalist; she is a special correspondent on politics and theology; but she is not a creative writer. For she has the critical, not the creative, temperament.