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Rh in a novelist whom they had believed only able to misrepresent the patrician circles of England. But "Under Two Flags" amazed by its perusal from still another cause. It contained one of the most thrillingly dramatic episodes ever introduced into any novel of the school to which such episodes belong, namely, the wild desert-journey of Cigarette, the vivandière, bearing a pardon for the condemned soldier whom she loves. Cigarette reaches the place of execution just in time to fling herself upon her lover's breast and save him from the bullets of his foes by dying under them. We are apt nowadays to look askance at such heroic incidents, and the word "unnatural" easily to our lips as we do so. Perhaps it rises there too easily. Self-sacrifice of the supreme kind has gone out of fashion in modern story-telling, and by a tacit surrender we have given scenes like this, with all their warm-blooded kinships, to the domain of the theatre. That fiction will ever care to resume her slighted prerogative, the thriving influence of Zola and his more moderate American imitators would lead us to believe improbable. Still, the caprices of popular demand lend themselves unwillingly to prophecy. One fact, however, cannot plausibly be contradicted: the theatre has not invested her gift at any very profitable rate of interest, nor justified her present monopoly of all that is stirring in romanticism.

"Tricotrin," if I mistake not, was the first important successor of "Under Two Flags," and here Ouida gave us the noteworthy proof that she had turned her attention toward ideal and poetic models. I fear it must be chronicled that the chaff in "Tricotrin" predominates over the wheat. The whole story is not seldom on stilts, and we often lose patience with the hero as more of a poseur than of the demigod he is described. The entire donnée is too high-strung for its nineteenth-century concomitance. We feel as if everybody should wear what the managers of theatres would call "shape-dresses." Ouida still tempts the parodist; the machinery of her plot, so to speak, almost creaks with age, now and then; her personages attitudinize and are often tiresomely sententious. Tricotrin does so much with the aid of red fire and a calcium that his glaringly melodramatic death becomes almost a relief in the end. And yet the book scintillates with brilliant things, and if it had been written with an equal power in French instead of English, might have passed for the work of Victor Hugo. There is a great deal about it that the passionate and democratic soul of the French poet would have cordially delighted in. It belongs to the same quality of inspiration that produced "Notre Dame de Paris," "L'Homme Qui Rit," and "Fantine." But there have always been English people who have laughed at Hugo's tales, and in much the