The wildest suppositions concerning the eminent novelist's whereabouts were indulged in and the most contradictory reports were circulated.

Too much is made, of course, of the hero's personal relations with Charles XII, but that is a fault which few historical novelists have known how to avoid.

Goldsmith like Steele, had the Irish reverence for pure womanhood, and this reverence made him shun as a pest the vulgarity and coarseness in which contemporary novelists, like Smollett and Sterne, seemed to delight.

" But Sophie did all the next day, being delightfully gay at the dinner, and devoting herself to the young minister who was invited to meet the distinguished novelist, and evidently being afraid of him, gladly basked in the smiles of his charming neighbor.

As we grow acquainted with Thackeray's characters, we realize that no other ending was possible to his story, and conclude that his plot, like his style, is perhaps as near perfection as a realistic novelist can ever come.

It seems hardly fair, perhaps, to Lewisham to tell this; it is doubtful, indeed, whether a male novelist's duty to his sex should not restrain him, but, as the wall in the shadow by the diamond-framed window insisted, "Magna est veritas et prevalebit."

Believe me, young gentleman, war exists only in the brains of your sensational novelists.

Of minor novelists Lady Mary had also something to say from time to time.

And what shall I say of the host of female novelists which this age has produced,women who have inundated the land with productions both good and bad; mostly feeble, penetrating the cottages of the poor rather than the palaces of the rich, and making the fortunes of magazines and news-vendors, from Maine to California?

That persistent and inflexible determination which, from a fashionable novelist, has raised him to the dignity of leader of the Conservative party in the House of Commons, that unsparing and cold-blooded malignity which poisoned the last days of Sir Robert Peel, and those powers of wit and ridicule which make him so formidable an adversary, have all been impressed into this service.

Besides insisting upon the necessity for psychological analysis of a sort, the author here for the first time becomes a genuine novelist in the sense that her confessed purpose is to depict the actual conditions of life, not to glorify or idealize them.

It seemed to him that the difficulty was only one of selection, and he wrote two-thirds of a novel with a breathless ease of creation that made him marvel at himself and the pitiful struggles of less gifted novelists.

* * ALPHONSE DAUDET Tartarin of Tarascon Alphonse Daudet, the celebrated French novelist, was born at Nimes on May 13, 1840, and as a youth of seventeen went to Paris, where he began as a poet at eighteen, and at twenty-two made his first efforts in the drama.

Among novelists, Sir Walter Scott was perhaps the one she read most often; Jane Austen too was a favourite; but she also much enjoyed many of the later novelists, especially Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

Despite all adverse criticism, however, "Chuzzlewit" is worthy to rank with anything that ever came from the pen of the great Victorian novelist.

And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted with approval the intimacy which was, obviously, flourishing between the little novelist and Patricia.

Terror was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.

And it is most noteworthy that in this age, in which there is more knowledge than there ever was of what man has been, and more knowledge, through innumerable novelists, and those most subtle and finished ones, of what man is, that poetry should so carefully avoid drawing from this fresh stock of information in her so-confident horoscopes of what man will be.

" "It is not at all pleasant, I assure you, to be persecuted with invitations from people who wish to see a real live novelist.

With Richardson and Fielding it is customary to associate two other mid-eighteenth century novelists, Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) and Tobias Smollett (1721-1771).

In the year 1881, at a commemorative dinner given to her native novelist by the city of Manchester, it was announced that the public library contained two hundred and fifty volumes of his works, which passed through seven thousand six hundred and sixty hands annually, so that his stories were read at the rate of twenty volumes a day throughout the year.

A good-natured ordinary novelist might have found an easy solution for the difficulties of the case at an earlier stage by marrying Stephen to Maggie, and handing over Lucy (who is far too amiable to object to such a transfer) to her admiring cousin Tom; while Philip, left in celibacy, might either have been invested with a pathetic interest, or represented as justly punished for the offence of forestalling.

Usually the needy novelist's dedications were made up of servile adulation and barefaced begging.

" As pioneers, then, the author of "Betsy Thoughtless" and her obscurer contemporaries did much to prepare the way for the notable women novelists who succeeded them.

As the first chapter in a Code of Public European Law, they may mark the beginning of a time of settled peace, order, and disarmament, but they have not yet enriched a single author, though hereafter possibly an occasional novelist or play-wright may prosper greatly under their provisions.