author had only cared a little bit about them, they might have even that mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sorts of fiction. It is eternally true that the wounded is the wounding heart, and the mere descriptive and analytical method not only misses the natural human movement, but it is untrue in its results. Vivisection teaches something, no doubt, but it does not bring a knowledge of the natural animal. To get that knowledge you had better live with him a little, and even love him a little, and teach him to love you. All the scientific inquiry in the world is not worth--in art--one touch of affectionate understanding. Esther Waters is to go to a lying-in hospital, and thither goes her author before her, bent on what he can picturesquely set down about her surroundings. Her husband is to go to a hospital for consumption. Thither goes the author, and sets down things seen and heard with the wooden, conscientious precision of a bailiff’s clerk. The conception of things inquired into seems never to move him to interest, though one is forced to believe that once, at least, he has narrowly escaped the contagion of a great scene. Esther’s illegitimate child is born, and the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose bitterness has but a single solace--the joy of satisfied motherly love. There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore’s industry who would have moved the reader deeply with such a scene. But, if Mr. Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it. This mother-hunger is apparently just as affecting a thing to him as the position of the chest of drawers between the two windows--a fact made note of, and, therefore, to be chronicled. Either the writer is content coldly to survey this rage of passion, or he would have us believe he is so; and in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or an acrobat’s display in gesticulation. But, from a gentleman whose corns when trodden on are probably as painful as his neighbours’, we are content with something less than a godlike indifference to the emotions of humanity. Let us suppose, charitably, that this is no more than a pretence, and that Mr. Moore is neither at heart so callous nor in vanity so far removed from mere emotional interests as he would seem.