5th May. Rose who read Nordan probably do not read Maeterlinck, and thereby miss fa rare pleasure and delight, the loss of which, in our opinion, can scarcely be compensated by the very doubtful enjayment to be derived from the perusal of Degeneration or its even more vulgar successor A Comedy of Sentiment. Maeterlinck has endured much at Nor-dau's hands; the German doctor, with ruthless dissecting knife seized upon two of the most famous of the so-called Decadent's works, and literally ent them in pieces, afterwards handing round the diseased fragments for inspection without making a single allusion to the beauties of the almost perfect body from which they were torn, Few authors, certainly few poets, could come successfully out of such reckless mutilation as this, It is the treatment from which Browning has suffered so cruelly, and we doubt whether any famous poot could escape altogether unscathed diet the fiendish hand of the literary enger subject him to the same unfair test, "A few lines taken at random from any great work, published without context, and thereby rendered as mean-ingles as possible, naturally lose a vast amount of their literary value; especially when, as iti Maeterlinck's case, they suffer additionally by being translated into another language. Works like Les Sept Princesses and La Princesse Afaleine are too delicate and mystically beautiful to be treated as pathos logical specimens. To dissect them is like dissecting a primrose; the beauty lies in the complete and perfect flower and not in each tora petal. We decline to admit the-decadence of the present age; but we must acknowledge that the existence of these dustman of the Press is perhaps the only valid argument for ihe absurd theory. They are indeed
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.