It is a long time since I read this entrancing novel, and here in Paris, where I write, it is not attainable for reperusal. Hence many of the names of the characters have escaped my memory, though I can recall their personalities and actions vividly. I am still impressed with the acquaintance of a wonderful Greek--a Mr. Pericles, a wandering millionaire, ready upon hearsay to traverse Europe in the trail of undiscovered musical genius. Staying at the country house of one vulgar wealthy merchant, Mr. Pole, he unearths something like it in the voice of Emilia. The Pole family consists of three of those inimitable, ambitious, and diplomatic ladies that only Mr. Meredith hitherto has drawn us. I forget their names. There is a brother, Wilfred Pole, a cornet, one of those limp and flaccid _jeunes premiers_ novelists and opera-composers are fond of selecting to sing the sweetest tenor in duet with the heroines. The hero of the novel, as of the opera, is usually the heroine’s foil, his unworthiness the shade against which her splendour and strength shine. There is a dreadful Irish widow, whose name I certainly remember--Mrs. Chumps. This awful creature is, like the Irishman of English comedy, purely the result of Saxon imagination dwelling upon our island without the illumination of personal knowledge of the race or the country. I have here in Paris met a Scotchwoman who gravely informed me that she was gathering materials for an Irish novel, though she admitted she had never been in Ireland, and her acquaintance of Irish people is exclusively confined to the few specimens of the race she had had the misfortune to meet with abroad. I shall be curious to see that novel when it appears, and fancy she is not the first Britisher to represent us to posterity upon materials for observation so slight and so misguiding. The only sympathy the lady mentioned appears to bring to her gigantic task is a partiality for a liquid as peculiar to the lowlands and highlands of Scotland as to the mountains and bogs of Ireland. May unlimited quantities of whisky enlighten her and enliven us! for she is bitten by a mighty hatred of the nameless Celt. Under such circumstances, barring the stimulus of mountain distillery, the widow Chumps seems to have been drawn. Her brogue savours more of the Thames than of the banks of the Suir. Such an Irish brogue is nowhere to be heard in Ireland. And there is something curiously alien to that country in her denseness and want of sensitiveness, for we know that pride and sensitiveness are the curses of the race. She is an old flame of Pole’s--‘me Pole’ she perpetually calls him, to the horror of the refined daughters and the elegant cornet; and as Mr. Pole has squandered her money entrusted to him, he is obliged to endure her overt tendernesses and force his children to bow to her. This contest produces several lively scenes, including the sequel when the widow finds she is betrayed and cheated and her Pole a bankrupt. Mr.