readers, used to Thackeray and Dickens, to follow the unceasing play of intellectual pyrotechnics. The most beautiful thing in this remarkable book--next to Meredith’s generous defence of his heroine,--the tenderest, most naturally, humanly painted, is the sweet and faithful friendship between two intellectual women, one a soft-hearted, delicate Englishwoman with the milder and more clinging sentiments of her race, and the other our vivid Diana, made up of Irish cloud and Irish laughter, with her robuster and more ardent temperament. This is a fresh debt that women owe their mighty champion--the recognition of their capabilities for mutual friendship, faithful love and generous admiration, which the cynical male habitually denies them. Emma Dunstane married, loves her bright Tony, as she fondly calls Diana, above all the world; and Tony, tossed upon a sea of amatory difficulties, in turn beloved, rejected, and divorced, faithfully loves her friend Emma above even her faithless and her faithful lovers, of which Heaven knows she has choice enough. One of them, Mr. Sullivan Smith, is a sensational and finely-natured Irishman, too apparently created after Lever to be of value as a serious study. The story is well known. A beautiful, witty, young Irishwoman marries a wooden English official of docketed opinions well phrased. She is loved by many, notably one other Englishman, Redworth, a fine contrast with her husband, and Lord Dannisburgh, whose admiration excites her husband’s jealousy and leads to divorce. Her faithful friends throughout are Lady Dunstane and Redworth; afterwards Percy Dacier, at first suspecting and coldly scrutinizing, goes over to her and finally succumbs. He is a stiff and starched young Englishman, faultlessly correct and attractive after his fashion, which is the reverse of a warm one. Diana loves him, but there is a sort of Diana mist thrown over her love, which shows it as burning a cold clear light like ineffectual sunbeams upon a glacier. The young minister of state and she are engaged, and he returns late one night to breathe a state secret into her ears. This is the blot upon her character, the irretrievable blot upon her life. When he has kissed her for the first time--though no word so barbaric and indelicate as ‘kiss’ has been written in the record by the writer, fastidiously sensitive in preserving the snowy plumage of his paragon--explaining that he is but a mortal lover after all, she says the fault was hers that she was degraded. This is straining at gnats to swallow an enormous camel. She goes forth from this first embrace to sell his political news to a leading editor. Fact or fiction, we cannot get the unutterable ugliness of it out of our minds. But whether Dacier was justified in throwing her over for the action is for male judges to say. Great and passionate love, the sort of love such a woman should excite, would, I imagine, have found a ready road to pardon. Dacier is a cold-blooded