into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that Flaubert's _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that book which will appeal in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has borne beautiful fruit in _Thais_, is merely "strange" and has no more reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition. And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there is a paper in _Essays in London_ (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes to the obvious as _Partial Portraits_ (1888) which, with the exception of some interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and that Daudet was a Provencal. How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he published during this period. _The Portrait of a Lady_ (1881) is given a superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." One is glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is at once the most flexible _femme du monde_ and the freshest and most candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so