eculiar "naughty-childishness"[425] which
belongs to lovely woman, which does not materially affect her charm or
even her usefulness in some ways, but makes her as politically
impossible in one way as does that "incapacity for taking more than one
side of a question" which Lord Halsbury has pointed out, in
another.[426] The second is the picture, in the later half of the book,
of those Ionian Islands, then still English, the abandonment of which
was the first of the many blessings conferred by Mr. Gladstone[427] on
his country, and the possession of which, during the late or any war,
would have enabled us almost to pique, repique, and capot the attempts
of our enemies in the adjacent Mediterranean regions.

[Sidenote: _Madelon._]

All these books, and perhaps one or two others, are about the same
length--an equality possibly due (as we have seen in English examples on
a different scale) to periodical publication. But once, in _Madelon_,
About attempted something of much "longer breath," as his countrymen
say. Here we have nearly six hundred pages instead of three hundred, and
each page (which is a large one) contains at least half as much again as
a page of the others. The book is a handsome one, with a title in red
ink; and the author says he took three years to write the novel--of
course as an avocation from his vocation in journalism. It is difficult
to repress, though probably needless to utter, the most obvious remark
on this; but it is not hard to give it another turn. Diderot said (and
though some people believe him not, I do) that Rousseau originally
intended, in the Dijon prize essay which made his fate and fame, to
argue that science and letters had _improved_ morality, etc.; and that
he, Diderot, had told Jean Jacques that this was _le pont aux anes_, and
determined him to take the paradoxical side instead. The "Asses' bridge"
(_not_ in the Euclidic sense, nor as meaning that all who took it were
asses) of the mid-nineteenth century French novelist was the biography
of the _demi-monde_. Balzac had been the first and greatest engineer of
these _ponts et chaussees_; Dumas _fils_ had shown that they might lead
to no mean success; so all the others followed in a fashion certainly
rather ovine and occasionally asinine. Madelon is a young woman,
attractive rather than beautiful, who begins as a somewhat mysterious
favourite of men of fashion in Paris; establishes herself for a time as
a married woman in an Alsatia