uous and went away warbling into the night is alive in new as in old
pages, in defiance of fatigue. Preternaturally murderous gamblers with a
Quixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhuman
splendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph of
their history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. The
oddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Since
he first delighted us he has scarcely troubled himself once to find
a new story, or a new type of character, or a new field for his
descriptive powers. He took the Spanish mission into his stock-in-trade,
and he has since made that as hackneyed as the rest. And yet there
remains this peculiarity about him--his latest stories, are pretty
nearly as good as his first. It would seem as if his interest had not
flagged, as if the early impressions which impelled him to write were
still clear and urgent in his mind. He is amongst the most singular of
modern literary phenomena. The zest with which he has told the same tale
for so many years sets him apart. It is as if until the age, say, of
thirty he had been gifted with a brilliant faculty of observation, and
had then suddenly ceased to observe at all. There seems to have come a
time when his musical box would hold no more tunes, and ever since then
he has gone on repeating the old ones. The oddness is not so much in
the repetition as in the air of enjoyment and spontaneity worn by the
grinder. He at least is not fatigued, and to readers who live from hand
to mouth, and have no memories, there is no reason why he should ever
grow fatiguing.

Mr. Henry James is a gentleman who has taken a little more culture than
is good for the fibre of his character. He is certainly a man of many
attainments and of very considerable native faculty, but he staggers
under the weight of his own excellences. The weakness is common enough
in itself, but it is not common in combination with such powers as Mr.
James possesses. He is vastly the superior of the common run of men,
but he makes his own knowledge of that fact too clear. It is a little
difficult to see why so worshipful a person should take the trouble to
write at all, but it is open to the reader to conjecture that he would
not be at so much pains unless he were pushed by a compulsory sense of
his own high merits. He feels that it would be a shame if such a man
should be wasted. I cannot say that I have ever received;