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lous and daring composition, with a still higher aim and still deeper soul-pictures. Both of them will live forever as examples of union of the idealistic and the realistic schools, poetic evocations of a by-gone reality, with all the truth and poetry of new creations. In reading either of them we forget that the work is as instructive as it is imaginative.

The most vehement longing of our times, however, is manifestly after a faithful mirror of the present; that is to say, after a life-picture of the social relations and the struggles to which the evils of the present day have given rise. We feel that great events are being enacted; that greater still are in preparation; and we long for an epic, a world-moulding epic, to imbody and depict them. The undertaking is a dangerous one--many a lance is shivered in the first encounter. A mere tendency-novel is in itself a monster. A picture of the age must be, in the highest acceptation of the word, a poem. It must not represent real persons or places--it mus