Her first novel, “Robert Elsmere,” dealt with the subject of religion. A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy-tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief. Mrs. Ward made her hero one of these new-style clergymen, and somebody persuaded Gladstone to read the novel, and he wrote a long refutation of it, which caused a tremendous fuss. Statesmen in England, as a rule, read only Thucydides and Homer, while in the United States they read only the “Saturday Evening Post.” There were a great many people who never saw a modern novel, who hastened to read it when Gladstone called it dangerous. Half a million copies were sold in our country, and Mrs. Ward’s fortune was made. She had begun, you see, as a radical; and in her next novel, “The History of David Grieve,” she glorifies a young hero who devotes himself to social reform. But in a very few years success and wealth and the applause of the great changed the hue of this lady novelist’s reflections. She wrote “Marcella,” a complete recantation of her unorthodoxy, and a picture of what had gone on in her mind. Leaders of labor and social reformers now turn out to be dangerous demagogs; and a beautiful heroine, who loves one, discovers the error of her way, and comes back to safety as the wife of a nobleman’s son. From which time on Mrs. Humphry Ward was safe for aristocracy. She moved to a mansion in Grosvenor Place, where she had a view of the garden of Buckingham Palace. She became an intimate of duchesses, and a great figure in society and politics. Her publisher would negotiate with America before breakfast, and get her seven thousand pounds advance on a new novel; so the good lady spent the rest of her life grinding out a series of glorified pot-boilers in support of the Tory principles of government. Each novel was an Anglo-Saxon world event, and the counters of book-stores in the fashionable shopping districts of America were piled to the ceiling with the new volume. Mrs. Ward’s following was the Anglomaniac mob, people who have but one idea in life, to imitate the British governing classes; the sort of people who study those page advertisements and speculate anxiously: “What is Wrong with this Picture?” Says Mrs. Ogi: “I was in that mob. In our town in Mississippi there was no book-store, but an adventurous Jew who kept a cigar-store had the idea of getting a shelf of modern novels and renting them for ten cents a volume. I was the first young lady in the town who had the courage to go into a cigar-store, and I set all the other young ladies to reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.” “What did you get out of it?”