The curious and instructive part of all this is that, if Miss Corelli had been gifted with any power of self-criticism, her ardour would have been damped, and any work she might have done would have suffered proportionately. Her work has hit the public hard, and it has done so because, of its kind, her inspiration has been genuine. The wind does not blow through the strings of a well-ordered instrument, but _it blows_, and however grotesque the sound produced may sometimes be, it is of a sort which is not to be produced by any mere mechanism of the mind. To the critical ear the tunes played in ‘Wormwood’ and ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ are not, and cannot be, agreeable. The writer, to speak in plain English, and without the obscurity of symbols, is the owner of genius on the emotional side, and is not the owner of genius, or anything approaching to it, even from afar, on the intellectual side. The result of this disproportion between impulse and power is, to the critical mind, disastrous; but it does not so make itself felt with the ordinary reader. It is rather an unusual thing with him to come into contact with a real force in books. He has not read or thought enough to know that the ideas offered to him with such transcendental pomp are old and commonplace. It is enough for him to feel that the writer understands herself to be a personage. She succeeds in imposing herself upon the public because she has first been convinced of her own authority. Her inward conviction of the authority of her own message and her own power to deliver it is the one qualification which makes her different from the mob of writing ladies. Even when she deals with purely social themes the same air of overwhelming earnestness sits upon her brow. In a little trifle published in the November of 1896, and entitled ‘Jane,’ she goes to work with a quite prophetic ardour to tell a story almost identical with that related in a scrap of Thackeray’s ‘Cox’s Diary.’ The reader may find the tale in the second chapter of that brief work, where it is headed ‘First Rout.’ Thackeray tells his version of it with a sense of fun and humour. Miss Corelli tells hers with the voice and manner of a Boanerges.. Nothing is to be done without the divine afflatus, and plenty of it. The temperamental difference between the satirist and the scold is well illustrated by a large handling and a little handling of the same theme.