y, analyses of
uninteresting character, or the unnatural unfoldings of a sensation
plot, we took this volume into our hands with a feeling of pleasure. We
were disposed to beguile ourselves with the fancy that some new change
might possibly be rung upon donjon keeps, chain and plate armour, deeply
scarred cheeks, tender maidens disguised as pages, to which we had not
listened long ago." Now, that's a very good beginning, in my opinion,
and one to be proud of having brought out of a man who has never seen
you.'

'Ah, yes,' murmured Elfride wofully. 'But, then, see further on!'

'Well the next bit is rather unkind, I must own,' said Mrs. Swancourt,
and read on. '"Instead of this we found ourselves in the hands of some
young lady, hardly arrived at years of discretion, to judge by the silly
device it has been thought worth while to adopt on the title-page, with
the idea of disguising her sex."'

'I am not "silly"!' said Elfride indignantly. 'He might have called me
anything but that.'

'You are not, indeed. Well:--"Hands of a young lady...whose chapters are
simply devoted to impossible tournaments, towers, and escapades, which
read like flat copies of like scenes in the stories of Mr. G. P. R.
James, and the most unreal portions of IVANHOE. The bait is so palpably
artificial that the most credulous gudgeon turns away." Now, my dear,
I don't see overmuch to complain of in that. It proves that you were
clever enough to make him think of Sir Walter Scott, which is a great
deal.'

'Oh yes; though I cannot romance myself, I am able to remind him of
those who can!' Elfride intended to hurl these words sarcastically
at her invisible enemy, but as she had no more satirical power than a
wood-pigeon, they merely fell in a pretty murmur from lips shaped to a
pout.

'Certainly: and that's something. Your book is good enough to be bad in
an ordinary literary manner, and doesn't stand by itself in a melancholy
position altogether worse than assailable.--"That interest in an
historical romance may nowadays have any chance of being sustained, it
is indispensable that the reader find himself under the guidance of
some nearly extinct species of legendary, who, in addition to an impulse
towards antiquarian research and an unweakened faith in the mediaeval
halo, shall possess an inventive faculty in which delicacy of sentiment
is far overtopped by a power of welding to stirring incident a spirited
variety of the elementary human passi