will find, by the way, the very same secret divulged by Balzac in one of his love-letters to Mme. Hanska—among the feelings she inspires him with is “I know not what disdain in contemplating other men.”) In the face of this, what need to go ransacking Jane Austen’s Letters or Memoir for evidence that she had a love affair? No, it is because there is most of Jane Austen’s spiritual “identity” in Anne that “Persuasion” is the sweetest, tenderest, and truest of her books. I apologize for having wandered from Mansfield Park and Easton Neston and the other engaging futilities of the parlour game. T. W. ROBERTSON Fifty years ago to-morrow (February 3rd, 1871) died Thomas William Robertson, a great reformer of the English drama in his day, but now, like so many other reformers, little more than a name. His plays have ceased to hold the stage. Very few of them still allow themselves to be read. To-day their matter seems, for the most part, poor, thin, trivial, and their form somewhat naïve. “Robertsonian” has become for the present generation a meaningless epithet, and “teacup and saucer school” an empty gibe. Even within a few years of Robertson’s death George Meredith could only say of him: “In a review of our modern comedies, those of the late Mr. Robertson would deserve honourable mention.” As the old tag says, times change and we in them. Robertson is now a “back number.” His comedies are not classics, for classics are live things; they are merely historical documents. Yet you have only to turn to such a record as “The Bancrofts’ Recollections” to see how live these comedies once were, how stimulating to their time, how enthusiastically they were hailed as a new birth, a new portent, a new art. Indeed, for my part, when I read the glowing eulogies of John Oxenford and Tom Taylor and the other critics of that time I am filled with something like dismay. All that warm (and rather wordy—it was the way of the ’sixties) appreciation gone dead and cold! I wonder how many of our own judgments will stand the test of fifty years. Br—r—r!