society is aware that you think it a flock of geese, it revenges
itself by hissing loudly behind your back.

Of descriptions of scenery and art we have, of course, a large number,
and it is impossible not to recognise the touch of the real Ouida manner
in the following:

It was an old palace: lofty, spacious, magnificent, and dull. Busts
of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes stretching out gaunt arms into
the darkness, ivories brown with age, worn brocades with gold threads
gleaming in them, and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of
dead gods, were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight.
As he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale as the
Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless like the statue of
the wounded Love, came before his sight out of the darkness. It was
that of Gladys.

It is a manner full of exaggeration and overemphasis, but with some
remarkable rhetorical qualities and a good deal of colour. Ouida is fond
of airing a smattering of culture, but she has a certain intrinsic
insight into things and, though she is rarely true, she is never dull.
Guilderoy, with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities,
which are greater, is a book to be read.

Guilderoy. By Ouida. (Chatto and Windus.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES--VI

(Woman's World, June 1889.)

A writer in the Quarterly Review for January 1874 says:

No literary event since the war has excited anything like such a
sensation in Paris as the publication of the Lettres a une Inconnue.
Even politics became a secondary consideration for the hour, and
academicians or deputies of opposite parties might be seen eagerly
accosting each other in the Chamber or the street to inquire who this
fascinating and perplexing 'unknown' could be. The statement in the
Revue des Deux Mondes that she was an Englishwoman, moving in
brilliant society, was not supported by evidence; and M. Blanchard,
the painter, from whom the publisher received the manuscripts, died
most provokingly at the very commencement of the inquiry, and made no
sign. Some intimate friends of Merimee, rendered incredulous by
wounded self-love at not having been admitted to his confidence,
insisted that there was no secret to tell; their hypothesis being that
the Inconnue was a myth, and the letters a romance, with which some
petty details of actual life had been