In choosing novels the ordinary reader need not at first concern himself with the history of a novelist or his technical characteristics, or with the place which critics have given to him in their schemes of literary development. A simple method of selection is to find on somebody’s advice a novel that has interested many readers, and then if it prove good, to try another by the same author. If a writer has produced two novels that interest you, it is safe to assume that he has written a third and a fourth. Some writers, it is true, have been distinguished for a single masterpiece. “Don Quixote” is the only book of Cervantes’ that we are likely to care for. “Robinson Crusoe” is all that most people have found good in Defoe’s tales (though there is much merit in his other stories). No other book of Mrs. Stowe’s is even second to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Vicar of Wakefield” is the glorious whole of Goldsmith’s narrative prose, though he succeeded in every other form of literature, including the prose drama. But the man who can write two novels can write three if he has time; the two-novel power is likely to be a ten-novel power with torpedo fleets of short stories and essays. Anyone who has liked “Silas Marner” and “Middlemarch” will not need to be urged to read “Felix Holt,” “Adam Bede,” “Romola,” “The Mill on the Floss.” The person who has once read and enjoyed two novels of Dickens is likely to read six or eight. “Pendennis” leads to “The Newcomes.” And any of Trollope’s “Barchester,” novels is an introduction to the happily interminable series. [Illustration: HAWTHORNE] I have purposely said little about the short story, because in this day of magazines we all read short stories, some of them pretty good ones. There are fifty persons who can write one or two acceptable short tales to one who can make a novel of moderate merit. And the great writers of the tale have often been novelists as well, so that if one begins to read novels one will meet with the best short stories which have been worth collecting into volumes. Readers of “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Scarlet Letter” will make the acquaintance of Hawthorne’s “Twice Told Tales” and “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Among modern fictionists of importance Poe stands almost alone as a writer of tales who never tried the longer and greater form of the novel, though there are several excellent authors, such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, whose short tales outweigh in value, if not in quantity, their more extended narratives.