very literary restaurant, you detect its flavour in your
morning leader and your weekly review. The pie gravy finds its way into
the prose and the verse of a whole young generation. It has a striking
flavour, an individual flavour, It gets into everything. We are weary
of the ceaseless resurrections of that once so toothsome dish. Take it
away.

The original pie is no worse and no better, but thousands of cooks have
had the recipe for it, and have tried to make it. Appetite may have
vanished, but the pie was a good pie.

No simile runs on all fours, and this parable in a pie-dish is a poor
traveller.

But this principle of judgment applies of necessity to all great work
in art. It does not apply to merely good work, for that is nearly always
imitative, and therefore not much provocative of imitation. It happens
sometimes that an imitator, to the undiscerning reader, may even
seem better than the man he mimics, because he has a modern touch. But
remember, in his time the master also was a modern.

The new man says of Dickens that his sentiment rings false. This is a
mistake. It rings old-fashioned. No false note ever moved a world, and
the world combined to love his very name. There were tears in thousands
of households when he died, and they were as sincere and as real as if
they had arisen at the loss of a personal friend.

We, who in spite of fashion remain true to our allegiance to the
magician of our youth, who can never worship or love another as we loved
and worshipped him, are quite contented in the slight inevitable dimming
of his fame. He is still in the hearts of the people, and there he has
only one rival.

No attempt at a review of modern fiction can be made without a mention
of the men who were greatest when the art was great When we have done
with the giants we will come down to the big fellows, and by that time
we shall have an eye for the proportions of the rest. But before we
part for the time being, let me offer the uncritical reader one valuable
touchstone. Let him recall the stories he has read, say, five years ago.
If he can find a live man or woman anywhere amongst his memories, who
is still as a friend or an enemy to him, he has, fifty to one, read a
sterling book. Dickens' people stand this test with all readers, whether
they admire him or no. Even when they are grotesque they are alive. They
live in the memory even of the careless like real people. And this is
the one unfailing trial by w