Her death was tragic for she realised that she had failed to accomplish that which she had set out to do. She was a great character to whom truth made a profound appeal. Illusions and shams were abhorrent to her. She showed this in her dispassionate description of herself; her power of separating herself from her subject is extraordinary. Above all her predilections, she sought reality. In a world where the majority prefer illusions, it was difficult for her to find congeniality. For a while she believed that she found it in Benjamin Constant but it was transitory. She died alone, solitary in death as she had been in life. Some day a psychologist will explain why the artistic temperament is inimical to happiness. Madame de Charrière had health, beauty, charm, wealth, a complaisant husband, an ardent lover, an indulgent conscience and withal ability which was loudly applauded and remotely echoed, but she was not happy. Perhaps she would not have gone all the way with Anatole France who said that he had never had a happy day in his life, but she would know just what he meant to convey. Beauty, fame, love and riches are seldom synonymous with happiness. The case of Zélide is only one instance of the truth of this statement; she has sisters in all races, in all times, and Yang Kuei-Fei, whom Mrs. Shu-Chiung introduces to Western civilisation under the name of _The Most Famous Beauty of China_, is another of those whom the gods loved and tortured. Then there is the form of biography that is not a portrait of the soul or of the body, nor is it exactly fictional biography. It stands midway between the psychographed and the idealised life. A conspicuous practitioner of this branch of art is Meade Minnigerode. He calls his latest book _Lives and Times, Four Informal American Biographies_. Mr. Minnigerode has at his service a keen--almost too keen--fictional sense. He seems to have less regard for truth and facts than for incidentals that make a good picture and enhance a story; and in his painstaking and careful selection of material, he uses only whatever assists him in building characters and situations. He has searched not so much for that which reveals character as motives in higher relief. As a result, we know less accurately what the four characters really were, than what Mr. Minnigerode thought they were--almost what he thought it would be interesting for them to be. The book, however, is convincing and that may be its greatest danger. Whatever one’s cool judgment may be, it carries; and this success is probably due to the many vivid scenes and to the clever, if not profound or necessarily true, characterisations.