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252 that her "imagination, vigorous though it be, and prolific, seldom rises to really poetic heights." This is certainly depressing for any one who has taken delight in such exceptional prose-poems as "Ariadne" and "Signa." Still, a proper avoidance of enthusiasm must always form part of the modern critic's equipment; the fashion is to look at everything imperturbably, from the Sphinx to the Brooklyn Bridge; we somehow only tolerate the exorbitant and the florid when it takes the shape of disgusted invective. For a long period Ouida has endured the latter (not always quite patiently, if some of her retaliatory newspaper letters are recalled), and I confess that we owe Miss Preston a debt of gratitude for breaking the ice at last. None the less, however, do we own to a feeling that the ice might have been assailed by a little heavier and more efficient cleaver. The Atlantic reviewer appears, indeed, to be a trifle afraid, not to say ashamed, of her own pioneership. Tradition would seem to be furtively reminding her that she is heading a revolt against it. And there certainly might well seem a kind of literary defiance in any defence of Ouida. She has stood so long as a pariah that to give her boldly a few credentials of respectability, as it were, might in a temperament by no means timid still require some courage. I would not even appear to suggest that Miss Preston has doubted her own assertions concerning this great romancist, whenever they have been of a favorable turn. But it has struck me that she has almost doubted the advisability of her own position as so distinct a non-conformist. One smiles to remember the ridiculous abuse poured upon Ouida in England ever since somewhere about the year 1863. She has probably afforded more opportunity for the callow undergraduate satirist than any author of the present century. I do not maintain that she was at first the recipient of an undeserved ridicule. But afterward this ridicule, because of the radical change in her work, became pitiably tell-tale; it revealed that aggravating conservatism in those who arraigned her which had its root in either a very unjust, hasty, and perfunctory skimming of her later books, or an entire ignorance of their contents. She undoubtedly began all wrong. There are some liberal and high-minded people with whom the follies and faults of such stories as "Granville de Vigne" and "Idalia" have wrought so disastrously that all their future impressions have been colored by these unconquerable associations. It seems to me that Mr. Hawthorne is one of these, and I am certain that the late Bayard Taylor was one. When "Ariadne" appeared, only a year or two before Taylor's lamentably ill-timed death, he wrote concerning that enchanting tale in the New York Tribune with a sternness of condemnation most regrettable, as I thought, in so alert and vigorous an intellect.