Holliday shows no sign of failing us. I think the truth is that he is one
of those persons described somewhere by Wilson Follett; I think Follett
was trying to convey the quality of De Morgan. Follett said that with
Dickens and De Morgan it was not a question of separate books, singly
achieved, but a mere matter of cutting off another liberal length of the
rich personality which was Dickens or De Morgan. So, exactly, it seems to
me in the case of Holliday. A new book of Holliday's essays is simply
another few yards of a personality not precisely matched among
contemporary American essayists. Holliday's interests are somewhat
broader, more human and perhaps more humane, more varied and closer to the
normal human spirit and taste and fancy than are the interests of
essayists like Samuel Crothers and Agnes Repplier.

The measure of Holliday as an author is not, of course, bounded by these
collections of essays. There is his penetrating study of Booth Tarkington
and the fine collected edition of Joyce Kilmer, _Joyce Kilmer; Poems,
Essays and Letters With a Memoir by Robert Cortes Holliday_.

=ix=

A gesture can be very graceful, sometimes. A half-smile can be wistful and
worth remembering. That was a pleasant story, almost too slender
structurally to be called a novel, by Gilbert W. Gabriel, published in the
spring of 1922. _Jiminy_ is a tale of the quest of the perfect love story
by Benjamin Benvenuto and Jiminy, maker of small rhymes. The author, music
critic of The Sun, New York, had long been known as a newspaper writer and
a pinch hitter for Don Marquis, conductor of The Sun's famous column, The
Sun Dial, when Don was A. W. O. L.

CHAPTER III

STEWART EDWARD WHITE AND ADVENTURE

=i=

"Stewart Edward White," says George Gordon in his book _The Men Who Make
Our Novels_, "writes out of a vast self-made experience, draws his
characters from a wide acquaintance with men, recalls situations and
incidents through years of forest tramping, hunting, exploring in Africa
and the less visited places of our continent, for the differing occasions
of his books. In his boyhood he spent a great part of each year in lumber
camps and on the river. He first found print with a series of articles on
birds, 'The Birds of Mackinac Island' (he was born in Grand Rapids, March
12, 1873), brought out in pamphlet form by the Ornithologists' Union and
since (perforce) referred to as his 'first book.' In the height of the
gold rush