t home in his descriptions
of still life, some of which remind us of the faithfully minute detail
of old Dutch pictures.

Mr. Wilkie Collins, amongst our living novelists, best compares with
Le Fanu. Both of these writers are remarkable for the ingenious mystery
with which they develop their plots, and for the absorbing, if often
over-sensational, nature of their incidents; but whilst Mr. Collins
excites and fascinates our attention by an intense power of realism
which carries us with unreasoning haste from cover to cover of his
works, Le Fanu is an idealist, full of high imagination, and an
artist who devotes deep attention to the most delicate detail in his
portraiture of men and women, and his descriptions of the outdoor and
indoor worlds--a writer, therefore, through whose pages it would be
often an indignity to hasten. And this more leisurely, and certainly
more classical, conduct of his stories makes us remember them more fully
and faithfully than those of the author of the 'Woman in White.' Mr.
Collins is generally dramatic, and sometimes stagy, in his effects. Le
Fanu, while less careful to arrange his plots, so as to admit of their
being readily adapted for the stage, often surprises us by scenes of so
much greater tragic intensity that we cannot but lament that he did
not, as Mr. Collins has done, attempt the drama, and so furnish another
ground of comparison with his fellow-countryman, Maturin (also, if we
mistake not, of French origin), whom, in his writings, Le Fanu far
more closely resembles than Mr. Collins, as a master of the darker and
stronger emotions of human character. But, to institute a broader ground
of comparison between Le Fanu and Mr. Collins, whilst the idiosyncrasies
of the former's characters, however immaterial those characters may
be, seem always to suggest the minutest detail of his story, the latter
would appear to consider plot as the prime, character as a subsidiary
element in the art of novel writing.

Those who possessed the rare privilege of Le Fanu's friendship, and only
they, can form any idea of the true character of the man; for after the
death of his wife, to whom he was most deeply devoted, he quite forsook
general society, in which his fine features, distinguished bearing, and
charm of conversation marked him out as the beau-ideal of an Irish wit
and scholar of the old school.

From this society he vanished so entirely that Dublin, always ready with
a nickname, dubbed him