26 JULY 1902, Page 16

SPLENDID MOURNING.

[TO THE EDITOR OP TRH "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—In your issue of July 19th your critique on a book called " Splendid Mourning " mentions the source from which the title is taken,—a translated motto from Madame de Steel, " Fame is for women only a splendid mourning for happiness." This seems to me rather a poor version of what I have always thought a very fine and pathetic utterance of Madame de Stael. Did she not say, " Fame is the showy mourning a plain woman wears for her• lost happiness " P The word I have italicised perhaps supplies in a lightning-flash that which makes the sentence a biography in two lines of its