feeling that an absolute incapacity for
appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no qualification for writing
a treatise on the subject.

As for Madame Sand's private life, which is so intimately connected with
her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before she could
write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it. He passes it over
with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for fear of wounding the
susceptibilities of those _grandes dames_ whose passions M. Paul Bourget
analyses with such subtlety, he transforms her mother, who was a typical
French _grisette_, into 'a very amiable and _spirituelle_ milliner'! It
must be admitted that Joseph Surface himself could hardly show greater
tact and delicacy, though we ourselves must plead guilty to preferring
Madame Sand's own description of her as an 'enfant du vieux pave de
Paris.'

_George Sand_. By the late Elme Marie Caro. Translated by Gustave
Masson, B.A., Assistant Master, Harrow School. 'Great French Writers'
Series. (Routledge and Sons.)

A FASCINATING BOOK
(_Woman's World_, November 1888.)

Mr. Alan Cole's carefully-edited translation of M. Lefebure's history of
_Embroidery and Lace_ is one of the most fascinating books that has
appeared on this delightful subject. M. Lefebure is one of the
administrators of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at Paris, besides being a
lace manufacturer; and his work has not merely an important historical
value, but as a handbook of technical instruction it will be found of the
greatest service by all needle-women. Indeed, as the translator himself
points out, M. Lefebure's book suggests the question whether it is not
rather by the needle and the bobbin, than by the brush, the graver or the
chisel, that the influence of woman should assert itself in the arts. In
Europe, at any rate, woman is sovereign in the domain of art-needlework,
and few men would care to dispute with her the right of using those
delicate implements so intimately associated with the dexterity of her
nimble and slender fingers; nor is there any reason why the productions
of embroidery should not, as Mr. Alan Cole suggests, be placed on the
same level with those of painting, engraving and sculpture, though there
must always be a great difference between those purely decorative arts
that glorify their own material and the more imaginative arts in which
the material is, as it were, annihilated, and absorbed into the creatio