. . .onsidered sex—the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art—with notable audacity and insight.  He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotion as he is of managing an affectation.  He can be trivial, or grotesque, or satirical, or splendid; and whether his milieu be romantic or actual, whether his personages be heroic or sordid, he goes about his task with the same assurance and intelligence.  In his best work he takes rank with the world’s novelists.  He is a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an intimate for Fielding and Cervantes.  His figures fall into their place p. 44beside the greatest of their kind; and when you think of Lucy Feverel and Mrs. Berry, of Evan Harrington’s Countess Saldanha and the Lady Charlotte of Emilia in England, of the two old men in Harry Richmond and the Sir Everard Romfrey of Beauchamp’s Career, of Renée and Cecilia, of Emilia and Rhoda Fleming, of Rose Jocelyn and Lady Blandish and Ripto. . . Read More