" NONE SO FAST AS STROKE " [To the Editor
of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—" Ouida " is easy to make fun of. She was eccentric and almost morbidly romantic, and occasionally wrote about things of which she knew nothing, e.g., " grassing" eagles faute de grouse. But-- (x) I think your correspondents who have been searching her works for the celebrated " All rowed fast but none so fast zs stroke," will probably search them- in vain. A memory of 3o years back may be treacherous ; but (subject to correction) I think I came across that sentence in one of the works of Alan St. Aubyn (pseudonym of a lady) who wrote books called A Fellow of Trinity and so on, which I cannot trace in the London Library Catalogue, but which may still repose, freely annotated (by others, not by me), in the Library of the Urdon Society at Cambridge.
(2) " Ouida," whatever her lapses, vividly imagined all she described (that is commonly the case with popular authors immeasurably inferior to her, like Miss Corelli), and, when describing things she had seen, wrote brilliantly.
(3) She had a good critical brain and, when not excited by her sentimental and dramatic dreams, wrote admirable, exact and melodious English. Let any man who inclines (on the strength of a dip into the beginning of Under Two Flags) to think of her as a joke read her late book of Critical Studies. He will find there literary essays (mostly reprinted from the Fortnightly, which did not print rubbish), even on such modern figures as d'Annunzio, which are in excellent prose, judicious, and still delightfully fresh.—Yours faithfully, The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W. z. J. C. SQUIRE.
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