hole
story. Then there is his sister Lady Sunbury, who is very anxious for
Guilderoy to marry, and is quite determined to hate his wife. She is
really a capital sketch. Ouida describes her as 'one of those admirably
virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of
virtue than the wickedest of sirens.' She irritates herself, alienates
her children, and infuriates her husband:

'You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you
are; but it is just that which makes you so damnably odious!' said
Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in
such stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor Street
looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match-
seller, 'My eye! ain't he giving it to the old gal like blazes.'

The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey. As he is not a genius
he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion. He begins by pitying
the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the
great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady
Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts 'a distant and arduous
Viceroyalty.' He is Ouida's ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has
apparently taken to the study of English politics. A great deal of her
book is devoted to political disquisitions. She believes that the proper
rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats. Oligarchy has great
fascinations for her. She thinks meanly of the people and adores the
House of Lords and Lord Salisbury. Here are some of her views. We will
not call them ideas:

The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is
the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people's needs and
resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it
has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent
follies.

A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it? The Caucus is
chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread,
forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad
calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd's which they know will go
to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.

Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never
seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid
consciousness of a grea