In the meantime a great _prima-donna_ appears upon the European stage, and all the world bows down before her. Happening to be in Paris, Little Billee is persuaded by his old chums, Taffy the Yorkshireman ex-soldier, and the "Laird of Cockpen"--painters both,--to go and hear the prodigy. Fancy their stupefaction at recognizing in the glorious singer the tuneless Trilby of five years gone! No longer Trilby O'Ferrall, but La Svengali, wife of their old acquaintance Svengali the Jew, who had recognized the possibilities of her voice when he first heard it in their Paris studio, and had afterwards captured her and cultivated it and by his mesmeric arts trained her as a singer and even made her love him as a dog loves his master. A day or two later, meeting him at a hotel, Svengali spits in Little Billee's face, and gets his nose pulled for his pains by Taffy. And then the great _prima-donna_ and her master go to London; and Trilby breaks down in trying to sing "Ben Bolt," and is hooted off the stage--Svengali's sudden death in a stage-box (unknown to anyone in the house) having broken the mesmeric influence that has made her a singer. She pines away, surrounded by her old friends the Englishmen, and an object of solicitude to all Christendom; and after her death Little Billee pines away, too, and no one is left but the big ex-officer Taffy--with the exception of Trilby, the most attractive character in the book. For Little Billee (whose sister he marries, after the death of Trilby, whom he, too, loved) is, truth to tell, somewhat of a prig, even after the sight of Trilby at the concert in Paris has roused him from the unemotional state to which her flight consigned him, years before; and Svengali is a beast, and Gecko is insignificant. The text of the book is the counterpart of its illustrations, for Mr. du Maurier writes as he draws--with infinite precision and detail. Nothing is omitted that could possibly heighten an effect. Instead of flashing a scene or a sensation upon you, he describes it and redescribes it, heaping up the adjectives in masses. His art is a different art from Kipling's, for instance, which never wastes a syllable. But the point to be decided is not one of methods but of results; and as a whole "Trilby" is delightful. It is a slow and laborious process by which the author creates an impression and surrounds his characters with the atmosphere he wishes us to see them in; but he does finally create the impression and the atmosphere, and in so doing justifies his means. He has steeped his mind in Thackeray, and so has had a noble master. Like "Peter Ibbetson," his new story is unique. It is a book that could have been written only by an artist--and illustrated only by the author; it is a book, moreover, in which the man and the style are one.