is shown most clearly in the success attained by the thoroughly sophisticated Anthony Hope with The Prisoner of Zenda, by the author of Peter Stirling with Janice Meredith, and most of all by the strange Adventures of Captain Horn, a bloody story of buried treasure, actually written by our beloved humorist, Frank Stockton. Mr. Stockton had the temperament most fatal to romance, the bright gift of humorous burlesque; the real Frank Stockton is seen in that original and joyful work, The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine. Yet the fact that he felt the necessity of writing Captain Horn, is good evidence of the tide. This romantic wave engulfed Europe as well as America, but so far as I can discover, the only work after the death of Stevenson that seems destined to remain, appeared in the epical historical romances of the Pole Sienkiewicz. Hundreds of the romances that the world was eagerly reading in 1900 are now forgotten like last year's almanac; but they served a good purpose apart from temporary amusement to invalids, overtired business men, and the young. There was the sound of a mighty wind, and the close chambers of modern realism were cleansed by the fresh air.

A new kind of realism, more closely related to reality, has taken the place of the receding romance. We now behold the "life" novel, the success of

which is a curious demonstration of the falseness of recent prophets. We were told a short time ago that the long novel was extinct. The threevolume novel seemed very dead indeed, and the fickle public would read nothing but a short novel, and would not read that unless some one was swindled, seduced, or stabbed on the first page. Then suddenly appeared Joseph Vance, which its author called an ill-written autobiography, and it contained 280,000 words. It was devoured by a vast army of readers, who clamoured for more. Mr. Arnold Bennett, who had made a number of short flights without attracting much attention, produced The Old Wives' Tale, giving the complete life-history of two sisters. Emboldened by the great and well-deserved success of this history, he launched a trilogy, of which two huge sections are already in the hands of a wide public. No details are omitted in these vast structures; even a cold in the head is elaborately described. But thousands and thousands of people seem to have the time and the patience to read these volumes. Why? Because the story is in intimate relation with life. A gifted Frenchman appears on the scene with a novel in ten volumes, Jean Christophe, dealing with the life of this hero from the cradle to the grave. This is being translated into all the languages of Europe, so intense is the curiosity of

the world regarding a particular book of life. Some may ask, Why should the world be burdened with this enormous mass of trivial detail in rather uneventful lives? The answer may he found in Fra Lippo Lippi's spirited defence of his art, which differed from the art of Fra Angelico in sticking close to reality:

"For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see."

I find in the contemporary "life" novel a sincere, dignified, and successful effort to substitute reality for the former rather narrow realism; for it is an attempt to represent life as a whole.

II

RICHARDSON

RICHARDSON was born somewhere in Derbyshire, in the year 1689. His father was a joiner, who originally intended that his son should enter the church not a bad guess at the youth's talents for godly instruction. But financial embarrassments prohibited an expensive education: and when fifteen or sixteen years old, the diligent Samuel was compelled to earn his living at business. Like Shakespeare, he had only the booktraining of the common school: he knew no language but his own: and although, as a printer, he had a bowing acquaintance with contemporary literature, he was never, to his bitter and lasting regret, either a learned or a well-read man. The Latin quotations in his books were prompted by his friends.

At school, however, he learned something besides the three R's; even at that tender age, the two things in which he chiefly excelled in later years — the manufacture of moral phrases and the knowledge of the hearts of women are what he practised and studied with unwearied assiduity. He

was a childish anomaly a wise and prudent prig. The boys called him "Serious and Gravity," but when did Richardson care for the opinion of boys and men, so long as he had their sisters on his side? As Mrs. Barbauld says, "He was fond of two things, which boys have generally an aversion to, letter-writing, and the company of the other sex." The author of Treasure Island represented exactly the opposite type; Stevenson was always a boy at heart, while Richardson, whatever he was in his teens, was never a boy.

Surely if it were ever given to any man to know the windings of a woman's heart, it was to Richardson, and he began training as a novelist in a way that may be earnestly recommended to all youthful literary aspirants. "I was not more than thirteen, when three young women, unknown to each other, having a high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love-secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct, for answers to their lover's letters: nor did any one of them know that I was the secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection; and the fair repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word, or