The reaction against realism shows itself now-a-days in many curious ways. Alongside of an intense devotion to science there flourishes the vulgarest superstition regarding the occupations and intellectual capacity of departed spirits, and the imagination of the present day finds its frequent expression in coarse melodrama. But even for the melodrama Ouida, clever as she is, lacks one important element--namely, a sense of humor. There is a monotonous seriousness in her stories, and frequently an unrelieved pathos, which is in direct violation of the law that commands grotesqueness and misery to be put in close antithesis by the writer who is anxious to win fame. The airy _badinage_ of some of her characters is singularly void of lightness and frolicsomeness. Their unfailing cynicism alone makes good this noticeable deficiency. This fault distinguishes Ouida very clearly from Dumas and Victor Hugo, for Dumas's high spirits seldom failed him, while Victor Hugo combines contrasting qualities in his novel as carefully as if he were making a salad. But Ouida can relieve the strain she makes upon her readers' feelings only by a profuse display of worldly wisdom. Every-day experience shows that vulgar, unrelieved cynicism is an easily-learned accomplishment: any credulous person, inclined to gossip and ashamed of being thought decorous, can be hand and glove with Ouida in a very short time, although it is by no means every one who out of such tawdry material can weave a story that shall be generally interesting. The double nature of this writer is an instance of a rather rare combination. She can be as vulgar as a gossiping dressmaker with a keen love of scandal, and yet she has a vein of poetical sensitiveness, of strong feeling, which stands in strange contrast with her heavy-handed cynicism. In fact, she gilds in her own fashion the crudest display of coarseness and selfishness. Possibly it is too much to say that she _gilds_: she hangs round with tinsel all sorts of subjects, over which she rejoices as a raw schoolboy rejoices over his first cigar; and this with an infantile delight in her own _savoir vivre_ and an ecstatic vain-glory in her faults which throw real merits into the shade.