loose, and so on, which is very comfortable and gratifying. I fancy the fact that they are not marked is due to your genial method of diffusing your Humor in even quantities throughout your books; so that one huge nail-mark would be needed. Or it may be that we (Society and the Lower Classes alike) are most inclined to mark passages that appeal to our sentiment. We read aloud the funny ones, but put a little mark by the others. Do you remember what Sudermann's Princess says of her ideal woman? A quiet, peaceful woman who would treasure a secret little joy like the apple of her eye, who would know nothing of the world except what she wanted to know, and who would have the strength to make her own choice when it pleased her.' I have marked that; and I haven't marked any of your books. But it is a case of not Cæsar more, nor Rome more. As I said, you are all spread out, like Honey over a generous slice of bread, for fear that some one might get an unsweetened bite. And sometimes your ether is so fine an essence that all who read may not breathe. I am quite sure that there are some passages that my Cousin Sarah, who dotes upon your works, has n't fathomed at all,-just skipped. It all depends upon one's sense of the Inappropriate the delicately Inappropriate. Not Malapropisms: something far more delicate than that. And your funny things never snigger at themselves; which some very funny things of other Authors are unable to resist doing.

We like you very much, Mr. De Morgan; and we hope that you will not stop. We like your beery parties too; there are not many of them, by the way, that are not Somehow Good.' When people are so bad as to be horrid, you refuse to be intimate with them. Take Lavinia Straker, for example. We are terribly afraid that she is Nohow Good;

and you were afraid about her too. We could n't get you to take us upstairs in her house; the farthest we could get was her drawing-room, and we felt that even that was musty. You as good as said that you didn't care to investigate; the fine profile was enough; and, like Hans Andersen's Elfin Maiden, poor Lavinia could n't turn around, because she was hollow behind.

Somebody has told me that you lack form, meaning (upon pressure) a certain kind of hanging togetherness that we inherit from the Works of the Ancients, who wrote no novels. (This again seems- But no matter.) It is true that you often work havoc with Time, and skip us over relentlessly from one period of the Plot to another and then back, like little girls (boys can't do it) who jump the rope and cry 'Faster,' and call for Pepper, Salt, and Vinegar. Intervals of weeks are nothing to you, and we hate to think of the wellmeaning, conscientious persons whom you have mixed up: one saying, 'Was this before his father died?' and the other saying 'No, after,' and both having to get out the book and look it up, and neither being satisfied that the other was right after all. But these readers are of the kind to be late for breakfast and say it was the fault of the clock, when they had never wound it at all and knew perfectly well that they had n't; and you know that they never do hear the alarm anyway: in other words, incompetent and unreliable witnesses, and therefore subject to dismissal at pleasure.

But to continue: it was Unity of Form, I believe, that I was told you were lacking in. For the purposes of argument, we are willing to admit the skin of the offense; but a deeper consideration will discover nothing wrong. You have, it seems, scorned to be palpably consecutive; and in this we discern conformity with a higher ideal of

Unity. Discarding curls, patches, high heels, and gewgaws in general, discarding even a limb or so and no end of fingers and toes if necessary, — you infuse us at once into the circulation of the Corpus Humanum, so that we may pass through the Heart, and feel how healthily it throbs, and testify to the fact that the Liver is living too high and the Lights are dull. For the Corpus Humanum is not in good working condition; oh dear, no! But the Heart is there, and things will probably mend, and at any rate we are right there and can see for ourselves. This stripping process resolves itself into a sort of innocent nudity suggestive of Ancient Art (I am glad that we managed to reach back to the Ancients somehow; they do lend respectability) and makes for a Unity of its own. Simplici myrto nihil allabores; throw away the rosecrowns and let us look at these things quietly and sanely. And sedulous you are, too, in your own way and with your own materials; even if seeming to flout Old Father Time and a few other indispensable things, none of which matter in the least.

A Letter to a Dead Author is considered no offense (I add wisely, in intention; we all admire Cæsar and he is none the worse), and the pardon of a Living Author should be freely granted to one who tries to approach him on his own ground: keeping by necessity strictly to the edges, and approaching only in so far as may be done by substituting periods where semi-colons are looked for, and semi-colons for periods; by avoiding any too precise balance of phrase or too pedantic cast of thought; and by not trying to frighten away average readers. It is not out of place to put it to you frankly: would you rather be written to and told that you had a high ethical sense of the underlying good in humanity; or would you not? And do you think that the

Editor would favor such a treatment? (This is an important question.) It seems so much more natural to speak to you in terms of yourself.

Pardon being granted, I conclude without more ado that I may be so personal as to tell you that your books are a strong justification of fiction. For unless one is a Great Mathematical Genius, or a Student of Old French, or a Biblical Critic, or something else extremely wonderful in some particular Line that wipes out all others (a Line being granted for this special case the unusual property of wiping out) — unless one is something unspeakably Superior, one ought not to do without fiction. I have seen people of more than average culture who went in for serious reading, as if anything could be more serious than a Problem Novel! and who ended by drying up. Perhaps they would have dried up at any rate; but I am convinced that a little wellchosen fiction would have renewed their sap and made them Human - which is something we are all supposed to be, but are not. I will go further than saying that your books are full of wisdom, and say (may I drop the trick, being in earnest?) that you yourself must be very wise. You have fared through the first stage of existence, which refuses to be crushed by the knowledge of Death; and are bravely on in the last, which will not be overpowered by the knowledge of Life. You have looked for honey, and have found it in the carcass of the lion: and after long gazing upon Death, the rose has seemed of a more tender pink.

All of this I infer in you: and you. have put it into Fiction and made it a part of History. For Fiction is indeed History, not of fact, but of the imagination. It relates and shows not only what has happened, but what may at any time happen; and is the mirror wherein each man may see reflected

his countenance, his manners, and often his moral life. Fortunate is the nation that possesses a fiction in which this last is portrayed. Civilization beholds itself at arm's length, and may judge of the justice and the wretchedness of its virtues. Here may our vices wear other men's garments, and preach to us in the inner region where we secretly admit them after having indignantly

denied them in public. In this private council alone are we willing to be censured for past errors, and to pledge our manhood to renewed efforts. Such is the power of the literature of the imagination. The dilettante may forever smear his canvas with leering rakes and smirking virgins: one figure lovingly outlined by the master's hand speaks eternally to the world.

My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine does.

Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the old Inns of Court. J. likes to boast that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the simple life with Charing Cross just round the corner.

The 'full tide of existence' sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one of the most difficult places in all the town to find, for those who do not know the way. Only two streets lead directly into it from anywhere, and they lead directly nowhere out of it again; nor do the thousands who pass in the near Strand as much as see the dirty courts and dark alleys which are my short cuts, much less the underground passages which serve the same purpose the mysterious labyrinth of carpenters' shops and warehouses and vast wine-cellars, grim and fantastic and unbelievable as Ali Baba and the whole Arabian Nights, burrowed under the Quarter, and ap

proached by tunnels so picturesque that Géricault made a lithograph of one when he was in London, so murderous that to this day they are infested with police who greet you with a flashing bull's-eye. Altogether, the Quarter is a 'shy place,' full of traps for the unwary. I have had friends, coming to see me for the first time, lose themselves in our underground maze; I have known the crowd, pouring from the Strand on Lord Mayor's Day, to get hopelessly entangled in our network; but, as a rule, nobody penetrates into it except on business or by chance.

For all that, there is a good deal to see in the Quarter. It is never dull, as I watch it from my high windows. To the front I look out on the Thames: down to St. Paul's, up to Westminster, opposite to Surrey, and, on a clear day, as far as the hills. Trains rumble across the bridges, trams screech and clang along the Embankment, tugs, pulling their line of black barges, whistle and snort on the river. The tide brings with it the smell of the sea and, in winter, the great white flight of

gulls. At night, myriads of lights come out; and always, at all hours and seasons, there is a sense of movement and of life: always I seem to feel the pulse of London, even as I have its roar in my ears.

To the east I look down to streets of houses black with London grime, still stately in their old-fashioned shabbiness, as old as the eighteenth century, which I have read somewhere means the beginning of the world for an American like myself.

To the west, I tower over a wilderness of chimney-pots, for our house is built on the edge of a hill, not very high, though the London horse mistakes it for an Alpine pass, but high enough to lift our walls on this side, sheer and cliff-like, above an amazing collection of tumbled, weather-worn, red-tiled roofs and crooked gables sticking out at unexpected angles, that date back I am not to be bullied by facts into saying how far, and that stretch away, range upon range, to loftier houses beyond; they, in their turn, overshadowed by the hotels and clubs on the horizon, and, in among them, an open space with the spire of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields springing up out of it, white and beautiful by day, a pale shadow by night—our ghost, we call it.

And most wonderful of all is the expanse of sky above and around us, instead of the tiny strip framed in by the narrow street, which is the usual share of the Londoner. We could see the sun rise every morning behind St. Paul's, if we were up in time, and of course if there were a sun every morning in London to rise. Over the river, when fog and mist do not envelop it as in a shroud, the clouds, the big, low, heavy English clouds, float and drift and scurry and whirl and pile themselves into mountains with a splendor that might have inspired Ruskin to I

do not know how many more chapters in Modern Painters had he lived in the Quarter.

sets

Behind our collection of tumbled roofs and gables awry, the sun - always provided there is a sun with a dramatic gorgeousness that, if it were only in any remote part of the world, the Londoner would spare himself no time nor trouble to see; but because it is in London it remains a spectacle for us to enjoy by ourselves.

And the wonder grows with the night; the river, with its vague distances and romantic glooms and starlike lights, losing itself in mystery, and mystery lurking in the little old streets with their dark spectral mass of houses, broken by one or two spaces of flat white wall, and always in the distance the clubs and hotels, now castles and cathedrals, and the white tapering ghost pointing heavenward. With so stupendous a spectacle arranged for my benefit, is it any marvel that much of my time is spent at my window? And how can I help it if, when I am there, I see many things besides the beauty that lured us to the Quarter and keeps us in it?

Hundreds of windows look over into mine; some so far off that they are mere glittering spots on a rampart of high walls in the daylight, mere dots or points of light after dusk; some always as carefully curtained as if the 'Drawn Blinds' or 'Green Shutters' of romance had not stranger things to hide from the curious. But others are too near and too unveiled for what goes on behind them to escape the most discreet. In what does go on there is infinite variety, for the Quarter, like the Inns of Court, is let out in offices and chambers and flats, and the house that shelters but one tenant is the exception, if indeed it exists. All these windows, and the people I see through them, have become as much a part of

my view as the trains and the trams, the taxis and the tugs.

I should think the last days of the Quarter were at hand if, the first thing in the morning, I did not find the printer hard at work at his window under one of the little gables below; or if, the last thing at night, I missed from the attic next door to him, the lamp of the artist, who never gets up until everybody else is going to bed; or if, at any hour I looked over, people were not playing cards in the first-floor windows of the house painted white, or frowsy women were not leaning out of the little garret windows above, or the typewriter were not clicking hard in the window with the white muslin curtains and the pot of flowers, or the manicurist not receiving her clients behind the window with the disreputable yellow blinds. I should regret even the fiery, hot-tempered little woman who jumps out of the roof window immediately below us, like a jack-inthe-box, and shakes her fist at us every time Augustine shakes those unfortunate rugs which are perpetually getting us into trouble with our neighbors. I should think the picture incomplete if, of an evening, the 'dinersout' were to disappear from behind the windows of the big hotel, though nothing makes me more uncomfortably conscious of the 'strangely mingled monster' that London is, than the contrast between them lingering over the day's fourth banquet, and the long black 'hunger line' forming of a winter morning just beside Cleopatra's Needle and waiting in dreary patience for the daily dole of bread and soup.

I cannot imagine the Quarter without actors and actresses in possession of dozens of its windows, the attraction to them less its associations with Garrick than its convenient proximity to the principal theatres; or without the Societies, Institutes, Leagues, Bureaus,

Companies, Associations, and I know not what, that undertake the charge of everything under the sun, from Ancient Buildings to Women's Freedom; or without the clubs, where long-haired men and Liberty-gowned women meet to drink tea and dabble in anarchy, where more responsible citizens propose to re-fashion the world and mankind, and, incidentally, British politics; where, in a word, philanthropists of every pattern fill the very air of the Quarter with reform, until my escape from degenerating into a reformer despite myself seems a daily miracle, and the sham Bohemianism of the one Club willing to let the rest of the world take care of itself becomes almost a virtue. It is probably the seclusion, the cloistral repose, of the Quarter that attracts the student and the scholar. Up at my windows, the busy bee would be given points in the art of improving each shining hour. In every direction I turn I am so edified by the example of hard work that I long for the luxury of being shocked by idleness. Behind the window I look down into, at right angles from the studio, the Scientist in white apron, superintending a litter of bottles and retorts and microscopes, is always industriously examining germs, oblivious to everything outside

which for too long meant, among other things, the shower of soft white ashes and the evil greasy smoke and the noxious odors sent up by the germs through his chimneys into our studio; nor could the polite representations of our agent that he was a public nuisance rouse him from his indifference. It was only when J. protested, with an American energy effective in England, that the germs ceased to trouble us and I could bear unmoved the sight of the white-aproned Scientist at his window.

In the new house with the flat roof the Inventor has his office, and I am