account of fate, natural deduction, and _a priori_ logic. She is,
however, for all that, to some extent a creation; one may imagine her,
long for her, look for her,--one will not immediately find her. Youth
never was painted so well as here; both Julia and Alfred are aureoled in
its beauty; they are not reasonable mortals with the accumulated
perfections of three-score and ten, but young creatures just brimmed, as
young creatures are, with the blissfulness of being. Nobody ever
appreciated youth as this writer does, nobody has so entered into it;
he never fails, to be sure, to make you laugh at it a little, but all
the time he confesses a kind of loving worship of that buoyant time when
the effervescence of the animal spirits fills the brain with its happy
fumes, of that fearless, confident period that

"Is not, like Atlas, curled
Stooping 'neath the gray old world,
But which takes it, lithe and bland,
Easily in its small hand."

We have often wondered that no one ever before grappled with the
material of this last volume. The easy ability of one person to
incarcerate another in a mad-house is as often abused in America as in
England, and circumstances in this drama which might strike a casual
reader as preposterous we can match with kindred and more hopeless cases
within our own knowledge. Perhaps one of the ablest portions of the
treatment which this book affords the theme is in the singular
collocation of characters,--the hero being wrongfully imprisoned as
insane, the heroine's father really made so by medical malpractice, the
hero's sister dying of injuries received from another maniac, his uncle
being imbecile, and his father and one of his physicians becoming
monomaniac. Nicer shades than these allow could not be drawn, and the