ABSTRACT
But Mrs Humphry Ward stands upon a different footing. Her personal position is dignity itself She is, ofcourse, incapable ofadvertising her works, either by such exhibitions ofdiseased egotism as the author of the 'Hilltop' idea imposes upon us, or by wrangling with her critics in the public highway. She offers her books in all seriousness as literature, and half the reviewers ofEngland seem honestly to believe that they are literature. Her admirers speak ofher as a second George Eliot, and by dint of their iteration the parallel has come to be taken for granted by the mass. You find at every turn the author ofMiddlemarch being weighed in the critical scales against the writer of Marcella, as if there were no longer any dispute whatever about the propriety of a comparison between the two. The fact that Mrs Ward has this year received the highest price for serial rights in her latest novel, Sir George Tressady, ever paid (up to that time) naturally confirms this impression in the general mind. It was thought a year ago that she was falling off in popularity here in England. So shrewd a judge as Mr Fisher Unwin so firmly believed this to be the case that he relinquished the British agency of the Century Magazine rather than commit himself to the exceptional sale of this new novel, which the price paid for it made it necessary to count upon. But I am not sure that the mere mention of the figures-$IS,ooo-has not fully revived her waning hold upon the British reviewers' and novel-readers' imagination-if: indeed, it ever did suffer diminution.
