Mr. Anthony Hope has been so lucky as to please the public in two styles. In the one _genre_ he has displayed an undoubted capacity, marred here and there to some tastes by a not very defined seeming of superciliousness, and in the other he has taken us into the most agreeable regions of unrestrained romance in which English readers have had leave to wander this many a day. He has caught the very tone of simple-hearted sincerity in which his later stories demand to be told. As an example of the adaptation of literary method to the exigencies of narrative it would not be easy to light on anything better. It is a little surprising that the trivial story and the trivial style of ‘Mr. De Witt’s Widow’ should have come from the hand which gave us the histories of the Princess Osra, and created the Kingdom of Ruritania. The one kind of work is clever, and smart, and knowingly--rather pretentiously--man-of-the-worldish. The other is large and simple, sweet and credulous. Mr. Hope, from his latest pages, has breathed on a tired and jaded time the breath of a pure and harmless fancy, and has earned its thanks for that benefaction. It has been seen that the art of fiction as practised at this hour includes almost all known forms of romance, and that no school may be said to have its own way to the exclusion of another. It has been seen, too, that though this is not a day of pre-eminent greatness, we can boast an astonishing industry and fertility. The output of literary work has never been so large, nor has the average of excellence ever been so equal or so high. It has been demonstrated--it is being demonstrated in new instances two or three times a year--that literary talent is not at all the uncommon and half-miraculous thing it was once supposed to be.