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256 same spirit Ouida's country men laughed at the itinerant, communistic Tricotrin, with his superb beauty, his pastoral abstemiousness and purity, his altruistic philanthropy, his forsworn birthright of an English earl, his wide clientèle of grimy and outcast worshippers, and his astounding range of opportunity to appear just in the nick of time and succor the oppressed. Far more daring license with the manipulation of fact, however, has been taken by the elder Dumas and others. Ouida's book came about thirty or forty years too late for sober critical acceptance in her own country, and it was of a kind that her own country has never permanently accepted. Still, it revealed her perhaps for the first time as an original power in letters. She had struck in it the one note which has always been most positively her own; she had told the world that she was a prose-poet of dauntless imagination and solitary excellence. As an idealist in prose fiction no English writer has thus far approached her. "Tricotrin" would not alone have made her what she is. It remained for her to improve upon this remarkable effort, and to fling up, like some tract of land under convulsive disturbance, peaks that for height and splendor far outrivalled it. The valleys in her literary landscape are sometimes low indeed; a few even have noxious growths in them, and are haunted by foolish wills-o'-the-wisp. Such, I should say, are her first few sustained works, like "Granville de Vigne" and "Strathmore." Nor has she always clung to the talisman by which she afterward learned to invoke her best creations. At times she has seemed to cast this temporarily away, as in "Friendship" and "A Winter City." I have now reached, as it were, my one sole conclusion regarding her abilities at their finest and securest outlook. She is an idealist, and that she should have determinedly remained. The foibles of modern society are no subjects for either her dissection or her satire. She has never been any more able to become a Thackeray or a Dickens than they, under any conceivable circumstances, could have become Ouidas. It is an immense thing for a writer to recognize just what he is capable of doing best, and to leave all the rest alone. But Ouida, with a burning uneasiness, has continually misunderstood her own noble gifts. With an eye that could look undimmed at the sun, she has too often grown weary of his beams. Once sure of her wings, white and strong as they proved, she had nothing to seek except the soft welcome of the air for which they were so buoyantly fitted. But no: she has repeatedly folded them and walked instead of flying. Birds that fly with grace do not often walk so. She is a poet, and she has forgotten this truth with a pertinacity which has been a deprivation to the literature of her time. And yet for several years after the publication of "Tricotrin" the idealist was