She is
really a capital sketch. Ouida describes her as 'one of those admirably
virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of
virtue than the wickedest of sirens.' She irritates herself, alienates
her children, and infuriates her husband:

'You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you
are; but it is just that which makes you so damnably odious!' said
Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in
such stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor Street
looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match-
seller, 'My eye! ain't he giving it to the old gal like blazes.'

The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey. As he is not a genius
he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion. He begins by pitying
the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the
great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady
Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts 'a distant and arduous
Viceroyalty.' He is Ouida's ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has
apparently taken to the study of English politics. A great deal of her
book is devoted to political disquisitions. She believes that the proper
rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats. Oligarchy has great
fascinations for her. She thinks meanly of the people and adores the
House of Lords and Lord Salisbury. Here are some of her views. We will
not call them ideas:

The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is
the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people's needs and
resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it
has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent
follies.

A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it? The Caucus is
chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread,
forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad
calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd's which they know will go
to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.

Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never
seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid
consciousness of a great noble that he is more capable of leading the
country than most men composing it would be.

Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and
uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails
of some successful general.

The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a
questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a metier, it is
wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of
it. To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture
into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he
expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.

There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.