It's a bargain.

* * * * *

Between the rising of the partisans of the Duchesse DE BERRI and the
dawn of the Tractarian movement there would not seem, at first blush,
to be any very close association apart from the coincidence of their
dates; yet in _The Vision Splendid_ (MURRAY), by D.K. BROSTER and G.W.
TAYLOR, a link is furnished in the person of an English clergyman's
daughter, who marries a Frenchman of the "Legitimist" aristocracy, and
is loved, before and afterwards, by an enthusiastic disciple of the
Oriel Common Room. But the link is too slight to give a proper unity
to the tale; and we have to fall back upon contrasts. Even so, the
two modes of life which made up, between them, the experience of the
_Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon (née Horatia Grenville_) are too cleanly
severed by the estranging Channel to be brought into sharp antithesis,
except in the heart of the one woman. And, since it is difficult to
understand why anyone so British in her independence and aloofness
should have surrendered her heart to the first good-looking Frenchman
who came her way, we never get to be on very intimate terms with that
organ. The construction of the story tends to break up the action and
make its interest desultory. While we are spending a hundred odd pages
at one time and fifty odd at another in Paris and Brittany we forget,
very contentedly, about Oriel; and while we are in residence at Oxford
we are practically cut off--no doubt, to our spiritual gain--from
the things of France. The authors seem to belong to the solid
old-fashioned school that had the patience to spread itself and leave
as little as might be to the imagination. I suspect one of them
of supplying the foreign information and the other of being the
correspondent on home and clerical affairs. I don't know how many of