Mr. James discriminates judiciously when he styles The Europeans :.>. sketch rather than a novel. It is, indeed, a series of brilliant sketches, held together by a slight thread of continuity, but lacking the intimate fusion of parts essential to narrative or dramatic unity. Mr. James describes street scenes, houses, gardens, and country sights and sounds better than he docs human characters, apparently because the former are conscientious copies from a model, while his men and women are fictions of the intellect merely, whom he makes known to us by description and assertion instead of by the natural unfolding of their dispositions and characters through the medium of their thinkings and sayings and doings. Interesting studies, therefore, as his portraitures in The EuropeatlS unquestionably arc, and although his actors are cleverly conceived and placed in lights and situations ingeniously contrived to afford entertainment, they do not seem sufficiently real to rouse our sympathies and to give the semblance of probability to fiction.