Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/32

 tribute to the virtues of "Victoria the Good." "Boy," though published about the time that the "Master-Christian" appeared, was accorded the heartiest of welcomes, being now in its forty-sixth thousand.

In days to come the "Master-Christian" and "The Sorrows of Satan" will, we venture to predict, be sufficient alone to preserve their author's fame; and, for those who delight in a love-story, "Thelma" will constitute a perpetual monument to its creator's memory.

Owing to the unique and unclassifiable nature of her productions, it is impossible to award Miss Corelli a definite place in the world of letters. It is under any circumstances a thankless task to arrange writers as one would arrange boys in a class—according to merit. There are the poets, the historians, the novelists, the humorists, and—the critics. Marie Corelli occupies a peculiarly isolated position. A novelist she is, in the main, and yet hardly a novelist according to cut-and-dried formulas; she is, unquestionably, a poet, for there is many a song in her books not a whit less sweet because it is not set in measured verse and line. So we may safely leave her place in the Temple of Fame to be chosen by the votes of posterity, for there is one critic who is ever just, who goeth on his "ever