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260. In other words, we gave ourselves up to the alternately gentle or stormy wizardries of a poet, contented in the oblivion thus begotten for decorated statistics of the annalist or placid vivisections of the surgeon. I am aware that all such departure from his cherished modern standards must at once be tyrannously cried down as a bore by that self-satisfied arbiter, the average reader of to-day. Perhaps Ouida felt some necessity of propitiating this multiform custodian of profit and loss. It may have been that her publishers told her, with that sincere sadness born of financial depression, how much handsomer had been the "returns" from "Strathmore" and "Chandos" than from "Ariadne" or "Signa." Be this as it may, Ouida forsook her new gods, and, except in the composition of some exquisite short pieces which recalled the purity, the human breadth, and the past star-like radiance of "A Provence Rose," "A Dog of Flanders," and "The Nürnberg Stove," I do not know of her having ever again hewn her statues from the same flawless Pentelic marble.

But the resumption of her old more materialistic task—that of writing novels which should reflect the doings and misdoings of her own century—she was now prepared to undertake with a much firmer hand and with an unquestionably chastened sense of old delinquencies. The tale "Friendship" may be said to commemorate this unfortunate transition. It marks the third distinct change in Ouida's mental posture toward her public. It is to me a descent and not an elevation, and yet I freely concede that the novelist rediviva was in every way superior to the novelist who lived and rhapsodized before. In "Friendship" we see much of the flare and glare once thrown upon every-day occurrences tempered to a far more tolerable light. Deformity often takes the lines of just proportion, and not seldom of amiable symmetry as well. Miss Preston praises "Friendship" as pre-eminently readable in every part, and here I should again differ with her, since in my judgment the book contains a great deal of insufferable tedium. Ouida's worst fault as a stylist is here laid tormentingly bare. She harps with such stress of repetition upon the guilty bondage of Prince Ioris to Lady Joan Challoner that the perpetual circumlocution makes a kind of maelstrom in which interest becomes at last remorselessly swallowed. It has been stated that incidents and characters in "Friendship" were taken from Ouida's own life, and that Lady Joan Challoner's name conceals one belonging to a foe of the author. Whether this report be true or false, we resent the almost maliciously periphrastic style in which we are told again and again that Lady Joan was the jailer of Ioris and watched him struggle in vain with the gyves of his own sin. To have a nature of the most detestable selfishness described over and over till we are