experiences in the East End are told with an
unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in
it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting.
"It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember
that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage."

She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance,
on which she became an acknowledged authority. She was less well
known, but not less effective, as a reviewer--no one ever dissected
Charlotte Yonge so justly--and she excelled in personal description.
Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary Coleridge,
and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization. All her
literary work was based on a wide and strong foundation of generous
culture. German was to her a second mother-tongue, and she lectured
delightfully on _Faust_. Though she spoke of herself as talking
"fluent and incomprehensible bad French," she was steeped in French
scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating
guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a
great deal of Italian. The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted
were a motley crowd--Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne,
George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, "Mark
Rutherford" and Samuel Butler, Fenelon and Renan and Anatole France.
Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some
young girls she said: "We all think a great deal of the importance
of opening our windows and airing our rooms. I wish we thought
as much of airing our imaginations. To me poetry is quite like
that. It is like opening the window daily, and looking out and
letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little
room; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more
uncomfortable than I can tell you." She might have put the case
more strongly; for poetry, and music, and painting, and indeed all
art at its highest level, made a great part of her religion. Her
family had long ago conformed to the Church of England, in which
she was brought up; but she never shook off her essential Judaism.
She had no sympathy with rites or ordinances, creeds or dogmas,
and therefore outward conformity to the faith of her forefathers
would have been impossible to her; but she looked with reverent
pride on the tombs in the Jewish cemetery at Prague. "It gave me
a strange feeling to stand at the t