she was enraptured to see the innocent hawthorn walking back to her personified into “hoyden Mary.” The vision of hoyden Mary, concrete as Audrey and her turnip, was thenceforth one of the character studies on her comedy stage. Her own copies of her books were flecked with spear dints from the battles she had waged in their doing and undoing. The “passion for perfection” left her in no security in an end seemingly attained. Her pen knew no finalities. When she had reached the goal and you ran to crown her, she simply turned about to go over the course again at a more uniform pace or with a prettier action. Her biographical and critical work was never finished, even when it reached the final fastnesses of print. A new shade of insight would be cast by some small leaf of data just sprung up, to be noted in the margin. And how moved she was over the restoration of an old word to active use or shy experiment with one of valid lineage yet unaccustomed form! One remembers serious, even anxious, conversation with her on the word “stabile.” It was more poetic than other derivatives of the same root and had a subtly dignified access of meaning. Should it be used? Could one venture? And she did use it in the first printing of what became the last Oxford Sonnet, only, in her anxious precision, to revert to the authorized “stable” in the last printing of all. Of her one book of stories, Lovers’ Saint Ruth (1894) written in a rather wistful response to optimistic persuasion, she says: “I had no hold whatever on narrative.” And how should she have taken hold on beguiling and effective drama, she whose inner mind, when it was not musing in mediæval cloisters, was hedged about with tolerances, who was not shaken by the tempestuous prejudice and fierce resisting passions of which drama is made? Was she lax in a certain remote acceptance of mankind so long as it would, like Alexander, get out of the sun whereby she was regarding the Middle Ages or the soul? Not always: there was in her a sudden unexpected fierceness that amazed you, after you thought yourself used to her self-preservative withdrawals. On a delicate piece of literary work where a wife, hideously used, had suffered all things and forgiven all things, she commented tersely: “Not right. It hinders justice.” But as to the book of stories, she entered upon it with premonitory omen and probably did it under a stress of will. For tasks not native to her mind, as well as those remotely capable of being construed into pot boilers, she began “with a little aversion,”—indeed, with so much more than a little that the mere suggestion of them was usually declined as soon as offered.