maidens. They live in a world in which there is no question of their
passing Harvard or other examinations, but they stand very firmly on
their quaintly-shod feet. They are exhaustively "felt," and eminently
qualified to attract the opposite sex, which is not the case with
ghosts, who, moreover, do not wear the most palpable petticoats of
quilted satin, nor sport the most delicate fans, nor take generally the
most ingratiating attitudes.

[Illustration: The old house]

The best work that Mr. Abbey has done is to be found in the succession
of illustrations to "She Stoops to Conquer;" here we see his happiest
characteristics and--till he does something still more brilliant--may
take his full measure. No work in black and white in our time has been
more truly artistic, and certainly no success more unqualified. The
artist has given us an evocation of a social state to its smallest
details, and done it with an unsurpassable lightness of touch. The
problem was in itself delightful--the accidents and incidents (granted a
situation _de comedie_) of an old, rambling, wainscoted, out-of-the-way
English country-house, in the age of Goldsmith. Here Mr. Abbey is in
his element--given up equally to unerring observation and still more
infallible divination. The whole place, and the figures that come and
go in it, live again, with their individual look, their peculiarities,
their special signs and oddities. The spirit of the dramatist has passed
completely into the artist's sense, but the spirit of the historian has
done so almost as much. Tony Lumpkin is, as we say nowadays, a document,
and Miss Hardcastle embodies the results of research. Delightful are the
humor and quaintness and grace of all this, delightful the variety and
the richness of personal characterization, and delightful, above all,
the drawing. It is impossible to represent with such vividness unless,
to begin with, one sees; and it is impossible to see unless one wants
to very much, or unless, in other words, one has a great love. Mr. Abbey
has evidently the tenderest affection for just the old houses and the
old things, the old faces and voices, the whole irrevocable human scene
which the genial hand of Goldsmith has passed over to him, and there
is no inquiry about them that he is not in a position to answer. He is
intimate with the buttons of coats and the buckles of shoes: he knows
not only exactly what his people wore, but exactly how they wore it,
and how the