and science gives a novelty to her hits that makes her
formidable in the ring. No doubt, too, as we have owned before, there is
a faint and delicate attraction about the Fading Flower of later years
that at certain times and places makes it not impossible to sit under
her.

But the sphere of the Pretty Preacher lies really between these
extremes. She is not at war with mankind, like the nymph of bread and
butter; nor does mankind suspect her of subtle designs in her discourse
as it suspects the elder homilist. Her talk is just as easy and graceful
and natural as herself, and, moreover, it is always in season. She never
suffers a serious reflection to interfere with the whirl of town. She
quite sees the absurdity of a sermon at a five o'clock tea. No one is
freer from the boredom of a long talk when there is a chance of a boat
or a ride. But there are moments when one is too hot, or too tired, or
too lazy for chat or exertion, and such moments are the moments of the
Pretty Preacher. The first week of the holidays is especially her own.
There is a physical pleasure in doing, thinking, saying nothing. The
highest reach of human effort consists in disentangling a skein of silk
for her, or turning over Dore's hideous sketches for the Idyls. At such
a moment there is a freshness as of cool waters in the accents of the
Pretty Preacher. She does not plunge into the deepest themes at once.
She leads her listener gently on, up the slopes of art or letters or
politics, to the higher peaks where her purely dogmatic mission begins.
She is artistic, and she labors to wake the idler at her feet to higher
views of beauty and art. She points out the tinting of the distant
hills, she quotes Ruskin, she criticizes Millais. She crushes her
auditor with a sense of his ignorance, of the base unpoetic view of
things with which he lounged through the last Academy. What she longs
for in English art is nobleness of purpose, and we smile bitter scorn in
the sunshine at the ignoble artist who suffers a thought of his
butcher's bills to penetrate into the studio. If we could only stretch
the Royal Academicians beside us on the grass, what a thrill and an
emotion would run through those elderly gentlemen as they listened to
the indignation of the Pretty Preacher.

But art shades off into literature, and literature into poetry. We are
driven into a confession that we enjoy the frivolous articles that those
horrid papers have devoted to her sex. Is t