Here, indeed, in these incomparable stories, are imaginary great books that are as real to us as real ones are. Sometimes, as in ‘The Author of “Beltraffio,”’ a great book itself is the very hero of the story. (We are not told what exactly was the title of that second book which Ambient’s wife so hated that she let her child die rather than that he should grow up under the influence of its author; but I have a queer conviction that it was THE DAISIES.) Usually, in these stories, it is through the medium of some ardent young disciple, speaking in the first person, that we become familiar with the great writer. It is thus that we know Hugh Vereker, throughout whose twenty volumes was woven that message, or meaning, that ‘figure in the carpet,’ which eluded even the elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS. of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically. And it is also through Paraday’s disciple that we make incidental acquaintance with Guy Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS, and with Dora Forbes, the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These two books are the only inferior books mentioned by Mr. James. But stay, I was forgetting THE TOP OF THE TREE, by Amy Evans; and also those nearly forty volumes by Henry St. George. For all the greatness of his success in life, Henry St. George is the saddest of the authors portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE was splendid, and its splendour is the measure of his shame--the shame he bore so bravely--in the ruck of his ‘output.’ He is the only one of those authors who did not do his best. Of him alone it may not be said that he was ‘generous and delicate and pursued the prize.’ He is a more pathetic figure than even Dencombe, the author of THE MIDDLE YEARS. Dencombe’s grievance was against fate, not against himself. “It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art The art had come, but it had come after everything else. ‘Ah, for another go!--ah, for a better chance.’... ‘A second chance--that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’” The scene of Dencombe’s death is one of the most deeply-beautiful things ever done by Mr. James. It is so beautiful as to be hardly sad; it rises and glows and gladdens. It is more exquisite than anything in THE MIDDLE YEARS. No, I will not say that. Mr. James’s art can always carry to us the conviction that his characters’ books are as fine as his own.