ituation with more than
demi-goddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be not
irrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention something
which I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bare
idea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. The
arguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if ever
literary, belonging as they do to the class of Biblical, that is to say,
_un_literary, criticism. But strictly literary considerations,
furnishing argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought by
comparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that of
Helen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, of
course, in initial circumstance as opposite as possible, though they
_arrivent a pareille fin_. But behind their very opposition there is a
conception of the eternal feminine--partly human, partly divine--which
it would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and which
might, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out from
divers other Homeric characters of women or goddesses, from Hera and
Aphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "How
great a _novelist_ was in _Homer_ lost" is a theme too much neglected.

[497] For do not fixed hours always become a bore--except in respect of
meals? To have to love, or to lecture, or to do anything but eat, at _x_
A. or P.M. precisely, on such and such days in the week, is a weariness
to the spirit and the flesh alike.

[498] "The Novelists Who Cannot End" is one of the title-subjects which,
"reponing my senescent art," I relinquish to others.

[499] In the card sense.

[500] They run well into, if not over, the second hundred, and it is
proper to warn readers (and still more buyers) that different editions
vary the contents of individual volumes; so that, without some care, and
even with it, duplication is nearly certain. This bad habit, not quite
unknown in England, is rather common in France.

[501] If any one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to know this
admirable story, it may be well to say that the title is the nickname of
a young person, more pleasing than proper, who forms part of a convoy or
cartel of non-combatants passing through the Prussian lines in 1871. The
Prussian officer, imitating more mildly (and without the additional
villainy) the conduct of Colonel Kirke, refuses passage to the whole
party, unless s