undue prominence in the book. _Bébée_, on the other hand, reminds the reader of the innocent short tales: it is a charming little story without the ambitious tawdriness of the longer romances. _In a Winter City_, again, reeks with fashionable follies and is written in Ouida's most approved worst style. _Ariadne_, the latest of her novels, shows in many ways a marked improvement over her earlier work. The story is an admirably invented one: almost every incident is of course crammed with pathos, while the main plot is exceedingly touching. It is supposed to be narrated by an accomplished Roman cobbler, who is a sound critic of art as well as an expert repairer of shoes. He comes across one day a young girl of great beauty who has been wonderfully educated in the classics by her father, and who now, after her parent's death, has come to Rome to find her grandfather, a miserly Jew. This unnatural grandfather drives her from his door, and the cobbler, finding her in great misery, offers her his room, when she at once falls sick, while he lives in his stall. When she has recovered she begins to carve statues--her father had been a sculptor--and these coming to the sight of a great French artist, Maryx by name, he makes her his pupil. Gradually her teacher comes to love her, but there appears on the stage a great poet, Hilarion--there is never any lack of greatness in these novels--who is faultlessly beautiful and whom every woman infalliby loves at sight. Of course, Ariadne is not an exception, so that one day Maryx and the cobbler are surprised to find that Hilarion and she have run away together. It would be unnecessary to describe the book too closely from this point: it is enough to say that Hilarion soon wearies of her, while she never changes in her feeling toward him. When she is deserted in Paris the cobbler goes there and brings her back to Rome, when Maryx learns again the hopelessness of his love, and later Hilarion shoots him in a duel. After a time Ariadne dies broken-hearted, just as Hilarion has learned really to love her, so that he survives to mourn hopelessly the evil he has done. However this may sound in a cold abstract, it cannot be denied that the reader receives a deep impression of the tragedy which is the subject of the book. Ouida never fails to supply the tragic element in great abundance, but here it is given us not on the writer's mere assertion, but with such exposition of the characters as marks some of her later stories, but is perhaps more prominent here than elsewhere. The heroine, for instance, is well drawn: her intensity and purity, and indeed her genius, are all clearly brought before the reader. It is something rare to conceive such a character, but it is infinitely rarer to find any definite image of it conveyed by a writer to any one else. To be sure, this is done with a great waste of purple ink, but yet there are touches which indicate not power alone, but also that acuteness of observation and intelligent