catastrophe, but she will not unsex her creation. Another of her characters, Rosamond, she pursues with a minute, withering, one would say vindictive, contempt. It is the beautiful, distinguished young creature who marries Lydgate on account of his high connections, and who trains him to do up her plaits of hair for her, and allows him to talk the "little language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning it, "accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then miraculously dimpling toward her votary." How such a creature can become the cool blighting Nemesis of a hopeful home, ruining it by extravagance, and taking credit to herself for every act of calm revolt, until her wretched husband, who had meant to be another Vesalius, compares her to Boccaccio's basil, that flourished upon the brains of a massacred man, the author sees only too plainly, and shows forth in some of the most cutting scenes she has ever written. Her "Study of Provincial Life," while it reveals her warm poet's love for a lofty nature defeated by its conditions, shows still plainer her intimate and personal dread of the cold thin nature that kills by its commonplace. The last she rewards contemptuously with a carriage in the Park and a rich second match: the first she punishes with exquisite Junonine tenderness by giving her a little boy in the bride-chamber of the home of the clever young politician whom the local editor has called a "violent energumen." * * * * *