definite stage in the evolution of Mr Cannan. Though refusing to accept it as work of the first rank, I agree that it is an evidence of Mr Cannan's ability to write work of the first rank: he may never write it, but this book is his qualification for entering the race. His later novels, _Young Earnest_ and _Mendel_, have done him no good; they are too closely related to his own life; his private emotions are also too active in his pacifist skit, _Windmills_, which is inferior to _The Tale of a Tub_. Other novels, too, such as _Three Pretty Men_ and _The Stucco House_, exhibit painful superiority over the ordinary person; lacking humour, it seems that Mr Cannan has taken himself too seriously, one might almost say, too dramatically; those sufferings, misunderstandings, isolations, and struggles of his youth have been to him too vivid and too significant. For a long time his picture fogged his vision; he could not see himself for himself. But he may come to view more sanely the epic of his own life and more wholly the epic of the life of others. If he will consent to be less the actor and more the spectator, he will probably succeed in becoming the playwright. Mr Walpole does not, so definitely as Mr Cannan, view the world in terms of his own life, his personality is otherwise tinged: he is less angry, less chafed, and it may be that because he is of the softer Southern breed, he has no share in the dour aggressiveness of Mr Cannan's North country. And there is a variation in the self that Mr Walpole paints: it is not what he is, or even what he thinks he is, but what he would like to be. In his chief work, by which is meant the most artistic, _Mr Perrin and Mr Traill_, the writer shares with us much of the wistfulness he must have felt in his early manhood, but Mr Traill is not Mr Walpole; if he were, he would have recurred in other novels; he is the simple, delicate, and passionate young man (passionate, that is, in the modest English way), that Mr Walpole would like to be. This we know because Mr Walpole loves Traill and sees no weakness in him: now, one may love that which one despises, but that which one admires one must love. No lover can criticise his lady, if his lady she is to remain, and thus, in his incapacity to see aught save charm in his hero, Mr Walpole indicates the direction of his own desire. Yet, and strangely enough, in _The Prelude to Adventure_, there is a suggestion that Mr Walpole would gladly be Dune, haughty and sombre; in _Fortitude_, that he would be Peter Westcott, have his fine courage, his delicacy and his faith. He asks too much in wishing to be Proteus, but, in so doing, he puts forward a claim to talent, for he tells us his aspiration rather than his realisation. Indeed, if it were not that _The Prelude to Adventure_ is so very much his life in Cambridge, _Mr Perrin and Mr Traill_ his career in a little school, _Fortitude_ his life under the influence of London's