When "Quatre Bras" appeared, the master yielded unreservedly. ' It is Amazon work," he wrote, "there is no doubt of it ; and the first pre-raphaelite picture of battle we have had ; profoundly interesting, and showing all manner of illustrative and realistic faculty. The sky is most tenderly painted, and with the truest outlines of cloud of all in the Exhibition ; and the terrific piece of gallant wrath and ruin on the extreme left, where the cuirassier is catching round the neck of his horse as he falls, and the convulsed falling horse, seen through the smoke below, is wrought, through all the truth of its frantic passion, with gradations of colour and shade of which I have not seen the like since Turner's death."

Women Novelists

When we pass from Art to the field of Literature the triumphs of women become increasingly conspicuous. The woman novelist holds her own the world over, and with reason, for who should know so much of the deep currents of life as the potential wife and mother. The inherited knowledge of her sex, even though she may be neither wife nor mother herself, enables the woman writer to play on the whole gamut of human experience. And surely the half of the race which bears and rears both sexes should have an unrivalled knowledge of humanity.

Love, the primary element in works of fiction, is invariably acknowledged as the most potent factor in feminine life. The sentiment that

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, ' Tis a woman's whole existence has been repeated until it has become a truism, and it follows as a natural sequence that women should excel in the writing of it.

The woman novelist sometimes rises to a masterly analysis of the emotions of her sex, as for example the laying bare of the heart of Johanna Smyrthwaite by Lucas Malet, in Adrian Savage." Never surely has the tragedy of unrequited affection been more convincingly portrayed than in this picture of a woman, deeply loving, chaste, and honourable, but unfortunately devoid of beauty or attraction, giving her heart's treasures in vain.

The recent centenary of Harriet Beechei Stowe (1911) reminds us that a woman novelist holds the world's record for the most widely circulated book. It has been computed that there have been more copies sold of " Uncle Tom's Cabin " than of any other book in our tongue, save the Bible.

With her masterpiece, Mrs.stowe also won the distinction of producing the most powerful and successful in accomplishing its aim novel written with a purpose. Out of the depths of a mother's heart yearning over the cradle of her own little ones came the cry for the rights of the slave mother and the slave wife, which roused the world. That cry, too, came to the pitiful ears of the mother on the throne, and Queen Victoria, weeping over Uncle Tom, took a resolute stand with her Ministers that this country should remain neutral in the struggle between the Northern and Southern States of America, otherwise recognition might have been given to the slave States.

The Refuge Of The Pseudonym

This period which witnessed the remarkable triumph of a woman's pen in America, was also rich in feminine triumphs in our own land.

George Eliot was proving with " Scenes from Clerical Life " and " Adam Bede " that a woman could attain to the highest art in the writing of fiction, and the Bronte sisters, in their lonely moorland parsonage, were weaving stories which were destined to become classics of the world's literature. The publication of " Jane Eyre " marked an epoch, but Charlotte Bronte, like George Eliot and Georges Sand, felt it expedient to hide her sex under a nom de plume, so that her work might receive unbiassed criticism.

The arrival in London of that small, timid, shrinking woman from the remote Yorkshire parsonage to prove that she, Charlotte Bronte, was really " Currer Bell," whom the great English publisher had welcomed as a new star in the firmament of literature, is one of the most thrilling episodes in the history of woman's literary triumphs.

In this same fertile decade of feminine achievement, Mrs.gaskell won her first fame anonymously, with ' Mary Barton," but when success was assured, she signed her own name to the immortal "Cranford." As the author, too, of " The Life of Charlotte Bronte," Mrs. Gaskell scored a triumph amongst the classic biographies of our tongue.

The mid-victorian period was rich, too, in other brilliant feminine successes, amongst which may be cited the enormous popularity of the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Braddon.

In our own day a very signal triumph was gained by Mrs. Humphry Ward. In " Robert Elsmere " she broke new ground by using the novel as a medium for dealing with religious doubt, and that, too, with such consummate art that the interest of the story was not subordinated to this underlying purpose. Readers who cared nothing about theological or social problems revelled in the charming studies of girl lif e - Catherine the saint, Agnes the wit, and Rose the beauty; and in the humours of the social life of a remote Westmorland parish.

All sorts and conditions of people, from scholars and theologians to humble working men, discussed and discussed again the problems revealed in " Robert Elsmere" ; the most noted pens reviewed it, and the author of the epoch-making novel found herself suddenly lifted from a secluded academic life into the position of being a person of public influence, and the founder of a cult.

The fertility of women writers in the field of fiction continues to in-crease. They attain popularity and accumulate royalties on a par with the male novelist.

Startling triumphs in fiction have recently been made in France by an untutored working woman, Marie Audoux, who has leapt into fame as the author of " Marie Claire," and in Sweden by Selma Lagerlof, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1909.

Although women's literary triumphs are most numerous in the world of fiction, we are not unmindful of the notable historical work of Mrs. J. R. Green in conjunction with her late husband in his " History of the English People," and in her own comprehensive work, " The Making of Ireland and its Undoing." And though we may not claim a female Chaucer or Milton, the names of

Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning prove that woman holds a high place in the realm of poetry.

Mrs. Humphry Ward, the pioneer writer of the "novel with a purpose," and a leader of philanthropic and Photo, ethical work amongst the poor H. Walter Harnett

The Drama awaits a female Shakespeare, and, indeed, a male Shakespeare also, but the twentieth century sees women gaining triumphs as playwrights, and their emancipation from Victorian traditions is bearing fruit in every branch of literary work.