I lay no claim to being possessed of any literary taste, so it will matter to no one when I say I can see no beauty and no art in Mr. Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." It is an entirely hateful book in my opinion. Neither can I endure Mrs. Ward's "David Grieve," and as this lady has undoubted literary gifts, I hope she will for the future avoid the religious "groove." It is extremely uninteresting, and is enough to cramp any author's style. Mr. Gladstone, who "boomed" "Robert Elsmere," apparently has nothing to say for "David Grieve," though it seems he can admire such crude performances as "Mdlle. Ixe" and "Some Emotions and a Moral." But it would never do for us to go by the taste of the Grand Old Man in these things. He is as variable as a chameleon. He might call our attention to the splendours of Dante on one occasion, and directly afterwards assure us that nothing could be finer in literature than the nursery rhyme of "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man." Dear old Gladdy! He is the greatest "leader" ever born in his quality of _mis_leading. It is difficult indeed to find a writer who is not more or less "groovy"--that is, one who will not only give us different stories, but different "styles." And as a rule the men writers are more "groovy" than the women, though the women are bad enough in their own particular way. Miss Braddon, for example, is, as every one knows, the "grooviest" of novelists going--her canvas is always prepared in the same manner, and the same familiar figures stand out upon it in only slightly altered attitudes. Her books always remind me of a child's marionette theatre, having the same set of puppets, who can be placed in position to enact over and over again the same sort of play. And it is a play that always amuses one for an hour, when one has nothing better to do. "Ouida," though she tells all sorts of different stories (of which her short ones are by far the best), has no difference of style--she is always the same old "Ouida"--and so will be to the end of her life's chapter. There are always the same wicked, but exquisitely lovely, ladies, to whom the marriage tie is frailer and less to be considered than a hair, and always the same good, pure, and _therefore_ (according to "Ouida") stupid girls who are just sixteen. There are always the bold, bad men with "mighty chests" and "Herculean limbs," who covet their neighbour's wives, or play havoc with the hearts of trusting maidens--and all these things are told with a gorgeousness of colour and picturesqueness of description that is not only brilliant, but very marvellously poetical. "Ouida" holds a pen such as many a man has good secret reason to envy. There are rich suggestions for both poets and painters in many of her books--but there is no convincing portrait of life, except in "Friendship," which was a satirical _exposé_ of the actual lives of some very questionable and unpleasant people. Yet