ng this period. Voltaire in
France had a burning message in every essay, and he paid far greater
attention to the development of the thought of his message than to the
story he was telling. Addison and Steele in the _Spectator_ developed
some real characters of the fiction type and told some good stories,
but even their best, like _Theodosius and Constantia_, fall far short
of developing all the dramatic possibilities, and lack the focusing of
interest found in the nineteenth century stories. Some of Lamb's
_Essays of Elia_, especially the _Dream Children_, introduce a
delicate fancy and an essayist's clearness of thought and statement
into the story. At the close of this century German romanticism began
to seep into English thought and prepare the way for things new in
literary thought and treatment.

The nineteenth century opened with a decided preference for fiction.
Washington Irving, reverting to the _Spectator_, produced his
sketches, and, following the trend of his time, looked forward to a
new form and wrote _The Spectre Bridegroom_ and _Rip Van Winkle_. It
is only by a precise definition of short-story that Irving is robbed
of the honor of being the founder of the modern short-story. He loved
to meander and to fit his materials to his story scheme in a leisurely
manner. He did not quite see what Hawthorne instinctively followed and
Poe consciously defined and practiced, and he did not realize that
terseness of statement and totality of impression were the chief
qualities he needed to make him the father of a new literary form. Poe
and Maupassant have reduced the form of the short-story to an exact
science; Hawthorne and Harte have done successfully in the field of
romanticism what the Germans, Tieck and Hoffman, did not do so well;
Bjornson and Henry James have analyzed character psychologically in
their short-stories; Kipling has used the short-story as a vehicle for
the conveyance of specific knowledge; Stevenson has gathered most, if
not all, of the literary possibilities adaptable to short-story use,
and has incorporated them in his _Markheim_.

France with her literary newspapers and artistic tendencies, and the
United States with magazines calling incessantly for good
short-stories, and with every section of its conglomerate life
clamoring to express itself, lead in the production and rank of
short-stories. Maupassant and Stevenson and Hawthorne and Poe are the
great names in the ranks of short-story wr