Disraeli, as the other had been to that lady's
husband--"Counterparts": a novel which, it is not too much to say, it is
impossible for human hand to excel;--superior to its predecessor, since
that was but a memorial, while this was the elaboration of an Idea. Here
the real author ceased awhile. Three succeeding books were but fancies
wrought out, grafts, happy thoughts, very possibly enforced work; but
there were no more spontaneous affairs of her own individuality, until
the one entitled "Almost a Heroine." In this work, which treated of the
possible perfection of marriage, the whole womanly nature of the writer
asserted itself by virtue of the mere fact of humanity. After this came
a number of juvenile stories, some commonplace, others infiltrated with
that subtile charm which breathes, with a single exception, through all
her larger books like the perfume of an exotic. Thus in the three novels
mentioned we have all that can be had of Elizabeth Sheppard herself:
in the third, her theory of life; in the second, her aspirations and
opinions; in the first, her passion.

The orphaned daughter of an English clergyman, and self-dependent,
in 1853 she translated her name into French and published "Charles
Auchester,"--a book written at the age of sixteen. That name of hers is
not the most attractive in the tongue, but all must love it who love
her; for, if any theory of transmission be true, does she not owe
something of her own oneness with Nature, of her intimacy with its
depths, of her love of fields and flowers and skies, to that ancestry
who won the name as, like the princely Hebrew boy, they tended the
flocks upon the hills, under sunlight and starlight and ill every wind
that blew? Never was there a more characteristic device than this
signature of "E. Berger"; and nobody learned anything by it. At first it
was presumed that some member of the house of Rothschild had experienced
a softening of the brain to the extent implied by such effusion of
genuine emotion, and it was rather gladly hailed as evidence of the
weakness shared in common with ordinary mortals by that more than
imperial family, the uncrowned potentates of the world,--the subject
and method of the book being just sufficiently remote from every-day
to preserve the unities of the supposition. Gradually this theory was
sought to be displaced by one concerning a German baroness acquainted
neither with Jews nor with music, humored as it was by that foreign
t