“OUIDA’S” essays are distinctively of the school which has been characterized as fin de siécle,—a school which expressed the spirit of protest observable in the last decade of the nineteenth century. As they were collected and published in America (“Critical Studies by Ouida,” Cassell & Co., Limited, 1900, New York), they are probably the last collection of essays published during the nineteenth century and certainly the last collection of the century sufficiently notable to be generally noticed by the American press. Their celebrated author is of French extraction, but she was born at Bury St. Edmunds, England. Among her best-known novels are “Strathmore,” “Chandos,” “Idalia,” “Tricotrin,” “Pascarel,” “Moths,” and “Princess Napraxine.” As an essayist, she shows great fire and force. Her feelings are intense, and her command of language is adequate for their expression. She is unconfined by conventionality or by respect for prejudice, but her motives are a deep-seated hatred of baseness and a sympathy for goodness such as Tennyson has described as “the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.” She is generally Latin, however, rather than English in her intellectual habits, and at times too she is Latin in her ethics.