ABSTRACT
Mr. Wilkie Collins succeeds better in fiction with the distant than the near. No one in an historical subject selects low or common life for a theme; probably because the Muse of History has not troubled herself about any classes below the highest, so that there is a want of data; and though there are many authors who cannot rise to the heights of a great argument, Mr. Collins can at least mount the stilts of rhetoric. Another reason for his greater success in his first novel, Antonina, was that his tendency to over-description was less felt as an obstruction. The reader took minute particulars about the degenerate Romans, and the rough vigorous barbarians, for information; but long word-pictures of the suburbs of London, their interiors, and similar things, are wearisome, because they are mere repetitions of familiar common objects.
