fault, too, that his scheme only interests him so far as it concerns
_Stephen_ and his society, and that the horror of the tragedy from
what one may loosely call the victim's point of view does not seem to
affect him at all. Otherwise, even for the sake of brevity, he could
not so flippantly refer to the body, sewn in a sack and thrown into
the river, as just "Eliza." He may argue that he never thought of the
corpse as a real one and that the whole thing was merely an experiment
in imaginative art; but his details are too well realised for that,
and so is his admirable picture of the society of Hammerton Chase,
W., a thin disguise for a riverside neighbourhood easy to recognise.
I could never get myself quite to believe that _Stephen's_ friend,
_Egerton_, accessory after the fact, would so long and so tamely have
borne the suspicion of it; but for the rest Mr. HERBERT'S study of his
milieu shows a very intimate observation. If his _Stephen_, in
whom the highest poetic talents are found tainted with a touch
of coarseness, may not always be credible, the passion for
self-expression which leads him on to versify his own experience in
the form of a mediæval idyll, and so give himself away, is true to
life. But my final impression of Mr. HERBERT'S book--he will perhaps
think I am taking him too seriously--is that his many gifts and
notably his humour, whose gaiety I prefer to its grimness, are here
exercised on a rather unworthy theme.

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[Illustration: MARTYRS OF SCIENCE:--THE INVENTOR OF TOFFEE.]

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=Fashions for Proxy-Fathers.=