In the treatment of Mrs. Humphry Ward, however, we have the key to the literary attitude of the Encyclopædia. Here is an author who epitomizes that middle-class respectability which forms the _Britannica’s_ editors’ standard of artistic judgment, and who represents that virtuous suburban culture which colors the Encyclopædia’s art departments. It is not surprising therefore that, of all recent novelists, she should be given the place of honor. Her biography extends to a column and two-thirds, much longer than the biography of Turgueniev, Zola, Daudet, Mark Twain, or Henry James; and over twice the length of William Dean Howells’s biography. Even more space is devoted to her than is given to the biography of Poe! Nor in this disproportionate amount of space alone is Mrs. Ward’s superiority indicated. The article contains the most fulsome praise, and we are told that her “eminence among latter-day women novelists arises from her high conception of the art of fiction and her strong grasp on intellectual and social problems, her descriptive power ... and her command of a broad and vigorous prose style.” (The same enthusiastic gentleman who wrote Mrs. Ward’s biography also wrote the biography of Oscar Wilde. The latter is given much less space, and the article on him is a petty, contemptible attack written from the standpoint of a self-conscious puritan.) Thackeray is given equal space with Balzac, and in the course of his biography it is said that some have wanted to compare him with Dickens but that such a comparison would be unprofitable. “It is better to recognize simply that the two novelists stood, each in his own way, distinctly above even their most distinguished contemporaries.” (Both Balzac and Victor Hugo were their contemporaries, and to say that Thackeray stood “distinctly above” them is to butcher French genius to make an English holiday.)