hand or, having gained it, to have held it against any real male in
or out of khaki. The fact is that "BERTHA RUCK" can achieve something
better than these meandering methods and this spinelessness of
characterisation; and it is distinctly disappointing to see her
content with the curate's egg standard.

* * * * *

It is time that some of our novelists put up a statue to NAPOLEON for
services rendered to the cause of fiction. In Miss MAY WYNNE'S A _Spy
for Napoleon_ (JARROLD) his misdeeds and those of his minions are made
to serve the purpose of emphasizing the loyalty of the heroine to her
lover. This lover was an Englishman of a type sufficiently familiar in
novels--cold and masterful, but, for some reason not apparent to me,
extremely attractive. As he seemed to be roaming about France with the
object of getting NAPOLEON out of the way by any means available, I am
not certain that he was playing the game, even when we remember that
the rules of it were lax enough at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. But we are not asked to weigh carefully the merits of
character. It is just a romance of incident, in which a hot pace is
set at the start and kept up to the finish. In short you get a good
run for your money, and that is all about it.

* * * * *

[Illustration: THE THEORIST.]

* * * * *

From a review of a novel:--