personality, he would not come into the class of those men who make copy of their past. And it is a feature of high redeeming value that in _Maradick at Forty_, he should have attempted to make copy of his future, for, again, here is aspiration. Mr Walpole needs to increase his detachment and widen the fields which he surveys. Schools and Cambridge: these are tales of little boys and their keepers; literary London: that is the grasshopper and its summer singing. He needs to develop, to embrace business and politics, the commonness of love, and the vital roughness of the world. He has tried to do this in _The Dark Forest_, but this is so close a _pastiche_ of Russian novels that it cannot stand for Mr Walpole's emancipation. IV In Mr Beresford we discover a closer identity between the man and the mask, though he has written several books where he does not figure, _The Hampdenshire Wonder_, the tale of an incredible child, _The House in Demetrius Road_, and _Goslings_, a fantastic commentary upon life. Mr Beresford is more at his ease when he tells his own tale. In three books, _The Early History of Jacob Stahl_, _A Candidate for Truth_, and _The Invisible Event_, Mr Beresford has exploited himself with some eloquence; he has the sense of selection, he is not crabbed, and he informs with fine passion those early years through which fleets a fine woman figure. In these books, as also in _Housemates_, Mr Beresford shows that he knows love, and isolation, and pain: those other young men with whom we are concerned feel these things, too, but hardly one so passionately. Mr Beresford's merit is that he is more ordinary, thus that he is less unreal than the passionate persons his rivals are or would be. Yet, if this were all, it might not be enough, for a tale may be told twice but not more often; if, in the first part of _Goslings_, Mr Beresford had not shown how closely and incisively he can picture the lower-middle class, analyse its ambitions, sympathise with its hopes, his would be a limited scope. I hope he will go further in this direction, extend his criticism of life through more of those people and more of their fates, while he himself remains outside. He must choose: Jacob Stahl, that is Mr Beresford, is a charming creature whom one would gladly know; but Jasper Thrale, expounding the world, is not Mr Beresford, for he is a prig. Mr Beresford may run on two lines: one for himself alone, and one for the world as he sees it.