exclusive. Each of them is an expostulation against what seemed to him
the perilous popularity of certain social and political theories, or a
warning against the influence of certain intellectual tendencies upon
individual character and national life. This purpose, however, though
common to the three fictions, is worked out in each of them by a
different method. The Coming Race is a work of pure fancy, and the
satire of it is vague and sportive. The outlines of a definite purpose
are more distinctly drawn in Chillingly-a romance which has the source of
its effect in a highly-wrought imagination. The humour and pathos of
Chillingly are of a kind incompatible with the design of The Parisians,
which is a work of dramatised observation. Chillingly is a romance; The
Parisians is a Novel. The subject of Chillingly is psychological; that
of The Parisians is social. The author's object in Chillingly being to
illustrate the effects of "modern ideas" upon an individual character,
he has confined his narrative to the biography of that one character.
Hence the simplicity of plot and small number of dramatis personae;
whereby the work gains in height and depth what it loses in breadth of
surface. The Parisians, on the contrary, is designed to illustrate the
effect of "modern ideas" upon a whole community. This novel is
therefore panoramic in the profusion and variety of figures presented by
it to the reader's imagination. No exclusive prominence is vouchsafed to
any of these figures. All of them are drawn and coloured with an equal
care, but by means of the bold broad touches necessary for their
effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures
are, indeed, but the component features of one great Form, and their
actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character-that of
the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France;-a character
everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real
hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic
illustration as being the most advanced in the progress of "modern