s not read or thought enough to know that
the ideas offered to him with such transcendental pomp are old and
commonplace. It is enough for him to feel that the writer understands
herself to be a personage.

She succeeds in imposing herself upon the public because she has first
been convinced of her own authority. Her inward conviction of the
authority of her own message and her own power to deliver it is the one
qualification which makes her different from the mob of writing
ladies. Even when she deals with purely social themes the same air
of overwhelming earnestness sits upon her brow. In a little trifle
published in the November of 1896, and entitled 'Jane,' she goes to work
with a quite prophetic ardour to tell a story almost identical with that
related in a scrap of Thackeray's 'Cox's Diary.' The reader may find the
tale in the second chapter of that brief work, where it is headed 'First
Rout.' Thackeray tells his version of it with a sense of fun and humour.
Miss Corelli tells hers with the voice and manner of a Boanerges..
Nothing is to be done without the divine afflatus, and plenty of it.
The temperamental difference between the satirist and the scold is well
illustrated by a large handling and a little handling of the same theme.

The point upon which it seems worth while to insist is this: That the
mass of the reading public is always ready to submit itself to the
influence of sincerity. It does not seem much to matter what inner
characteristics the sincerity may have. In the case now under analysis
the quality seems to resolve itself into pure self-confidence. Miss
Corelli's method of capturing the public mind is not a trick which
anybody else might copy. It is the result of a real, though perilous,
gift of nature--a gift which she possesses in something of a superlative
degree. Nobody could pretend to such a gift and succeed by virtue of the
pretence. Miss Corelli is, at least, quite serious in the belief that
she is a woman of genius. She is only very faintly touched with doubt
when she thinks that the people who are laughing at her are writhing
with envy. She speaks, therefore, with precisely that air of authority
to which she would have a right if her ideas with regard to her own
mental power were based on solid fact.

So far we arrive at little more than the long-established truth that the
unthinking portion of the public is not only longing for a moral guide,
but is ready to accept anybody who is con