Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/62

 suppose that they would, in the ordinary course of events, write criticisms upon the "Romance." In this expectation, however, she was doomed to disappointment. It received only four reviews, all brief and distinctly unfavorable. It may not be uninteresting, at this distance of time, to quote the criticism which appeared in a leading journal, as it is a very fair sample of the rest:

"Miss Corelli would have been better advised had she embodied her ridiculous ideas in a six-*penny pamphlet. The names of Heliobas and Zara are alone sufficient indications of the dulness of this book."

Less could hardly have been said. Had the paper been a provincial weekly, and the writer a junior reporter to whom the book had been flung with a curt editorial order to "write a par about that," the review could not have been more innocent of any attempt at criticism. It is highly apparent that the critic in question was not employed on the elbow-jogging terms known as "on space."

As for the names, it would have been equally absurd to call a Chaldæan—descended directly from one of the "wise men of the East"—and his sister, by the Anglo-Saxon Jack and Jill; or, indeed, to apply to them European nomenclature of any description. The "Romance," to quote its writer's