th his first work of fiction, _Antonina, or the Fall of
Rome_, which was clearly inspired by his life in Italy. _Basil_ appeared
in 1852, and _Hide and Seek_ in 1854. About this time he made the
acquaintance of Charles Dickens, and began to contribute to _Household
Words_, where _After Dark_ (1856) and _The Dead Secret_ (1857) ran
serially. His great success was achieved in 1860 with the publication of
_The Woman in White_, which was first printed in _All the Year Round_.
From that time he enjoyed as much popularity as any novelist of his day,
_No Name_ (1862), _Armadale_ (1866), and _The Moonstone_, a capital
detective story (1868), being among his most successful books. After
_The New Magdalen_ (1873) his ingenuity became gradually exhausted, and
his later stories were little more than faint echoes of earlier
successes. He died in Wimpole Street, London, on the 23rd of September
1889. Collins's gift was of the melodramatic order, and while many of
his stories made excellent plays, several of them were actually
reconstructed from pieces designed originally for stage production. But
if his colours were occasionally crude and his methods violent, he was
at least a master of situation and effect. His trick of telling a story
through the mouths of different characters is sometimes irritatingly
disconnected; but it had the merit of giving an air of actual evidence
and reality to the elucidation of a mystery. He possessed in the highest
degree the gift of absorbing interest; the turns and complexities of his
plots are surprisingly ingenious, and many of his characters are not
only real, but uncommon. Count Fosco in _The Woman in White_ is perhaps
his masterpiece; the character has been imitated again and again, but no
imitation has ever attained to the subtlety and humour of the original.

COLLODION (from the Gr. [Greek: kolla], glue), a colourless, viscid
fluid, made by dissolving gun-cotton and the other varieties of
pyroxylin in a mixture of alcohol and ether. It was discovered in 1846
by Louis Nicolas Menard in Paris, and independently in 1848 by Dr J.
Parkers Maynard in Boston. The quality of collodion differs according to
the proportions of alcohol and ether and the nature of the pyroxylin it
contains. Collodion in which there is a great excess of ether gives by
its evaporation a very tough film; the film left by collodion containing
a large quantity of alcohol is soft and easily torn; but in hot climates
the pres