There are movements of the classic torch round modern objects—strange drips and drops and wondrous waverings—that have the effect of putting it straight out. The range of reference that I allude to and that is most the fashion draws its credit from being an education of the taste, and it doubtless makes on the prescribed lines and in the close company of the ancients tremendous tests and triumphs for that principle. Nothing, however, is so singular as to see what again and again becomes of it in the presence of examples for which prescription and association are of no avail. I am speaking here of course not of unexpected reserves, but of unexpected raptures, bewildering revelations of a failure of the sense of perspective. This leads at times to queer conjunctions, strange collocations in which Euripides gives an arm to Sarah Grand and Octave Feuillet harks back to Virgil. It is the breath of a madness in which one gropes for a method—probes in vain the hiatus and sighs for the missing link. I am far from meaning to say that all this will find itself amended by the discreet dose administered the other day at the Taylorian of even so great an antidote as Flaubert; but I come back to my theory that there is after all hope for a world still so accessible to salutary shocks. That was apparent indeed some years ago. Was it not at the Taylorian that Taine and Renan successively lectured? Oxford, wherever it was, heard them even then to the end. It is for the Taines, Renans and Bourgets very much the salting of the tail of the bird: there must be more than one try. It is possible to have glanced at some of the odd estimates that the conversation of the cultivated throws to the surface and yet to say quite without reserve that the world of books has suffered no small shrinkage by the recent death of Mrs. Oliphant. She had long lived and worked in it, and from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious tribute. I know not if some study of her remarkable life, and still more of her remarkable character, be in preparation, but she was a figure that would on many sides still lend itself to vivid portraiture. Her success had been in its day as great as her activity, yet it was always present to me that her singular gift was less recognised, or at any rate less reflected, less reported upon, than it deserved: unless indeed she may have been one of those difficult cases for criticism, an energy of which the spirit and the form, straggling apart, never join hands with that effect of union which in literature more than anywhere else is strength.