ld more justly sum up the feeling of all who
knew James Runciman. "Bare power and tenderness, and such sadly human
weakness"--that is the verdict of one who well knew him. I cannot
claim to have known him well myself; but it is an honour to be
permitted to add a memorial stone to the lonely cairn of a
fellow-worker for humanity.

G.A.

AN INTRODUCTORY WORD ABOUT THE BOOK.

BY W.T. STEAD.

James Runciman was a remarkably gifted man who died just about the
time when he ought to have been getting into harness for his life's
work. He had in him, more than most men, the materials out of which
an English Zola might have been made. And as we badly need an English
Zola, and have very few men out of whom such a genius could be
fashioned, I have not ceased to regret the death of the author of
this volume. For Zola is the supreme type in our day of the
novelist-journalist, the man who begins by getting up his facts at
first-hand with the care and the exhaustiveness of a first-rate
journalist, and who then works them up with the dramatic and literary
skill of a great novelist. Charles Reade was something of the kind in
his day; but he has left no successor.

James Runciman might have been such an one, if he had lived. He had
the tireless industry, the iron constitution, the journalist's keen
eye for facts, the novelist's inexhaustible fund of human sympathy. He
was a literary artist who could use his pen as a brush with brilliant
effect, and he had an amazing facility in turning out "copy." He had
lived to suffer, and felt all that he wrote. There was a marvellous
range in his interests. He had read much, he improvised magnificently,
and there was hardly anything that he could not have done if only--but,
alas! it is idle mooning in the land of Might-Have-Beens!

The collected essays included in this volume were contributed by Mr.
Runciman to the pages of _The Family Herald_. In the superfine
circles of the Sniffy, this fact is sufficient to condemn them unread.
For of all fools the most incorrigible is surely the conventional
critic who judges literary wares not by their intrinsic merit or
demerit, but by the periodical in which they first saw the light. The
same author may write in the same day two articles, putting his best
work and thought into each, but if he sends one to _The Saturday
Review_ and the other to _The Family Herald_, those who relish
and admire his writing in-the former would regard it as little le