imagination; and behind her in the mire lies the crushed marital form, unutterably mean and shabby and foolish with his absurd ‘Yah, yah,’ on his lips. In the case of her English husband and her recreant English lover, her defender has no worse fault to urge against them than the stiff-necked prejudices of race. Both we see like respectable carriage-horses in harnessed strife with a young war-steed ready for dangerous speed and nerve-upsetting tricks--a potent, self-willed young creature, sniffing menacingly at conventionality, audacious from excess of purity, perilously poised upon every incalculable impulse, and in spite of a powerful intellect, scatter-brained upon all the ugly brinks in her career. No wonder the unhappy Saxon gentlemen allied to this wild and too lovely Hibernian lost their heads and turned tail when it came to a choice of swallowing her whole and entire and following meekly in her wake, the obedient satellites Mr. Meredith thinks they ought to have been, with heart filled with gratitude, and eyes full of love and admiration. That they did not do so is their lasting shame and reproach, and he reviles them as starched officials and stiff-necked Britons. Whereas another and a less partial biographer would mildly commend them to our pity, because of their undeniable sufferings at the expense of a female engine that ran them down and left them in fragments upon her path, he is only content in piecing the fragments in order the more powerfully to hold the feeble creatures up to our ridicule. If it had not been for that fatal newspaper episode, we should have been more than disposed to share his ardent sympathy, and range ourselves as warmly as he upon his heroine’s side. But the newspaper episode is an exceedingly big camel to be asked to swallow without as much as a wry face, above all to swallow and preserve intact our ideal of a persecuted, disinterested, and very noble woman. Though not the most artificial of his books, the atmosphere of ‘Diana’ carries a heavier scent of the midnight oil than even that garishly brilliant study of a pair of tragic comedians. There are dialogues in ‘Diana’ that only stop short of requiring a key--noticeably one after-supper scene when the air is charged with electricity, and wit oppressively polished flies hither and thither, broken confusedly upon rainbow sparkles of thought. Though we are sick of commonplace chatter, the intensity of self-consciousness and prolonged mental effort involved in such a game of battledore and shuttlecock, such a desperate intellectual race for the prize for barbed phrases and skilfully-managed metaphor, are surely exhausting. Diana and her numerous satellites seem never in the course of their lives to have enjoyed five minutes’ naturalness, and never to have known the luxury of mental dressing-gown and night-cap. Like the sun, their intellects never sleep, know not even the charm of drowsiness; and it is frequently a strain upon lazy, easy-going