burne found in the art of poetry. Just as Swinburne was the most
learned of our poets, so is Mr. James the most learned of our--let
us say 'our'--prose-writers. I doubt whether the heaped total of his
admirations would be found to outweigh the least one of the admirations
that Swinburne had. But, though he has been a level-headed reader of the
works that are good enough for him to praise, his abstract passion for
the art of fiction itself has always been fierce and constant. Partly to
the Parisian, partly to the American element in him we owe the stories
that he, and of 'our' great writers he only, has written about books and
the writers of books.

Here, indeed, in these incomparable stories, are imaginary great books
that are as real to us as real ones are. Sometimes, as in 'The Author
of "Beltraffio,"' a great book itself is the very hero of the story.
(We are not told what exactly was the title of that second book which
Ambient's wife so hated that she let her child die rather than that he
should grow up under the influence of its author; but I have a queer
conviction that it was THE DAISIES.) Usually, in these stories, it is
through the medium of some ardent young disciple, speaking in the first
person, that we become familiar with the great writer. It is thus that
we know Hugh Vereker, throughout whose twenty volumes was woven that
message, or meaning, that 'figure in the carpet,' which eluded even the
elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS. of whose last book
was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically. And it is also
through Paraday's disciple that we make incidental acquaintance with Guy
Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS, and with Dora Forbes,
the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These
two books are the only inferior books mentioned by Mr. James. But stay,
I was forgetting THE TOP OF THE TREE, by Amy Evans; and also those
nearly forty volumes by Henry St. George. For all the greatness of
his success in life, Henry St. George is the saddest of the authors
portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE was splendid, and its splendour
is the measure of his shame--the shame he bore so bravely--in the ruck
of his 'output.' He is the only one of those authors who did not do his
best. Of him alone it may not be said that he was 'generous and delicate
and pursued the prize.' He is a more pathetic figure than even Dencombe,
the author of THE MIDDLE YEARS. Dencombe's gr