politician, with whom we have not much sympathy, and are not sorry to see him degraded in his creator’s eyes, and, beside his brilliant betrayer, shrunken to shabby dimensions. He goes straight off--marries a pious and virtuous young heiress, and drops out of view. The stricken lady, reduced to a state of suicidal prostration, about whom the voices of rumour are for a second time busily and unkindly engaged, is not without her champions. Mr. Sullivan Smith and Arthur Rhodes meet on their way to propose for her, and eventually her faithful lover, Redworth, wins what he gallantly and manfully regards as a prize, and thus the end is saved from tragedy. We leave Tony too dazzled to know if her views of life are brighter, and bearing love for a dower to her husband. Only we continue to wish she had not visited that newspaper office. Equally artificial and brilliant, and of a fascinating brevity, is ‘Tragic Comedians.’ Limelight plays blindingly upon the characters, and Clotilda and Alvan seem to flash before us like a couple of splendid meteors, to faint and fade in their own exhausted light. We blink and gaze after them, thrilled, startled, and subdued by their resplendency, with a keen sense of the theatrical in their portraits and in their actions. Garish the book is, but most vivid, of a fascination not to be coldly analyzed, of a charm indescribable. It is simply the short story of the wooing of a royal lover, of his lady’s betrayal of his love, and of her marriage with his rival. Never was a wooing like Alvan’s, never such a lover. That is why we doubt the reality, and dream of the footlights. We listen to him and read his telegrams, and in spite of the Alpine sunlight and the cool mountain air, we think of fireworks. We read of Clotilda’s golden hair, and we picture her flying through the clouds, chased by her fellow-meteor and fronted by the black night of marriage that extinguishes her after his decent burial. Some of their sayings seem written across the memory in letters of dancing light, and we dream of the scenes enacted by this pair of tragic comedians long after we have left them. Of all Mr. Meredith’s lovers, Alvan is the one who fascinates and thrills us most.