with inextinguishable severity and contempt. There is something paralyzing in the cold anger with which Rosamond Vincy is branded and shamed; there is something appalling in the conscientious vindictiveness with which Tito is hunted down, step by step, to his final retribution. That delightful essayist, Mr. Karl Hillebrand, whose artistic nature is about as much at home among modern theories as a strayed Faun in a button factory, has given us a half-humorous, half-despairing picture of some old acquaintances under the new dispensation: of Manon Lescaut threatened with Charlotte Brontë's birch-rod; of Squire Western opening his startled eyes as Zola proceeds to detail for his benefit the latest and most highly realistic study of delirium tremens; of Falstaff, whom that losel Shakespeare treated so indulgently, listening abashed to George Eliot's scathing denunciations. "For really, Sir John," he hears her say, "you have no excuse whatever. If you were a poor devil who had never had any but bad examples before your eyes!—but you have had all the advantages which destiny can give to man on his way through life.
