s upon your definition of the word "much;" to me personally
they seldom seemed to be doing, or thinking about, anything else. Nor
could I help reflecting how much fuller and more vigorous all Mrs.
CLIFFORD'S cast would have found their existence to-day. Perhaps this
feeling explains a slight impatience which the society of so much
struggling femininity eventually produced in me. Young women still
live in houses in the Marylebone Road; they still proclaim republics
of hardworking celibacy, and fall briskly in love with the first
eligible bachelor; but their vocations and their citizenship have
both (_Hoch der KAISER!_) grown out of all knowledge. So that charming
writer, Mrs. CLIFFORD, must forgive me if I could find only an
historical interest, and no very robust one at that, in her amiable
retrospect.

* * * * *

AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE have certainly been well advised about
their sub-title to _The Black Office and other Chapters of Romance_
(MURRAY). For that is precisely what the tales are; and excellently
romantic and thrilling chapters too, for the most part dated in
the decade following the great Anglo-French peace of a century ago.
Probably you couldn't say off-hand what the Black Office was. Let me
whisper. It was, amongst other things, a postal censorship that opened
and perused all letters intended to cross the Channel. With what
natural indignation would you, in July three years ago, have read of
such monstrous activities! Truly, as the authors say, there is some
interest in the comparison of then and now. Of the other stories, my
own favourites would he "The Resurrectionist" and "The Smile on the
Portrait." The first of these is a haunting affair of body-snatching,
or rather of an early escapade of the notorious BURKE, who was
asked to supply a red-haired corpse, and not finding one produced
instead a gentleman who had yet to fulfil the condition precedent
to body-snatching, i.e. who had to be killed first and snatched
afterwards. This is certainly as grim as anything I have met over the
Castellated signature. Beside it, "The Smile on the Portrait," the
tale of a jealous husband who becomes a maniac, is almost soothing.
They had clearly their little worries even a century ago. The CASTLES,
as everybody knows, have always had the trick of adventurous fiction;
_The Black Office, etc._, proves that their hands have lost nothing of
their cunning.

* * *