resent taster, it does
not seem to be a consummated _consomme_. To begin with, there is too
much of it; it is watered out to over three hundred pages when it might
have been "reduced" with great advantage to one hundred. Nor is this a
mere easy general complaint; it would be perfectly possible to point out
where reductions should take place in detail. No one skilled in the use
of the blue pencil could be at a loss where to apply it in the
preliminary matter; in the journey; in the Hadgi's gravely burlesqued
correspondence; in the escape of the ladies; in Hermann's too prolonged
yet absurdly ineffective tortures; in the civil war between the King and
his subjects; in the rather transpontine victory of the two Americans
and the Maltese over both; and, above all, in the Royal Ball, where
English etiquette requires that the rescuer must be duly introduced to
those he has rescued. Less matter (or rather less talking about matter)
with more art might have made it a capital thing, especially if certain
traces of vulgarity, too common in About, were removed together with the
mere superfluities. At any rate, this is how it strikes, and always has
struck, a younger but now old contemporary.

[Sidenote: _Tolla._]

The same fault of _longueurs_ makes itself felt in _Tolla_: and indeed
the author seems to have been conscious of it, and confesses it in an
apologetic _Preface_ to the editions after the first. But this does not
form the chief ground of accusation against it. Nor, certainly, do the
facts, as summarised in a note, justify any serious charge of
plagiarism,[419] though the celebrated Buloz seems for once to have been
an unwise editor, in objecting to a fuller acknowledgment of
indebtedness on the part of his contributor. A story of this tragical
kind will bear much fuller handling than a comic tale of scarcely more
than one situation, recounted with a perpetual "tongue-in-cheek"
accompaniment.

But, from another point of view, the book does justify the drawing of a
general literary moral, that true _donnees_ are very far from being
certain blessings--that they are, in fact, _dona Danaorum_--to the
novelist; that he should not hug the shore of fact, but launch out into
the ocean of invention. About, in a fashion rather cheerfully recalling
the boasts of poor Shadwell, who could "truly say that he had made
it[420] into a play" and that "four of the humours were entirely new,"
assures us that he has invented everything but