Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest of these prefaces--that prefixed to _The Golden Bowl_, in which the effort to reveal something which is not revealed amounts almost to an agony--it would have been impossible to reconstruct the life of Henry James by the closest examination of his published writings. Ingenious commentators would have pieced together conjectures from such tales as _The Altar of the Dead_ and _The Lesson of the Master_, and have insisted, more or less plausibly, on their accordance with what the author _must_ have thought or done, endured or attempted. But, after all, these would have been "conjectures," not more definitely based than what bold spirits use when they construct lives of Shakespeare, or, for that matter, of Homer. Fortunately, in 1913, the desire to place some particulars of the career of his marvellous brother William in the setting of his "immediate native and domestic air," led Henry James to contemplate, with minuteness, the fading memories of his own childhood. Starting with a biographical study of William James, he found it impossible to treat the family development at all adequately without extending the survey to his own growth as well, and thus, at the age of seventy, Henry became for the first time, and almost unconsciously, an autobiographer. He had completed two large volumes of _Memories_, and was deep in a third, when death took him from us. _A Small Boy and Others_ deals with such extreme discursiveness as is suitable in a collection of the fleeting impressions of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his all but fatal attack of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps) 1857. I say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort of help in the way of dates is characteristic of the narrative, as it would be of childish memories. The next instalment was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, which opens in 1860, a doubtful period of three years being leaped over lightly, and closes--as I guess from an allusion to George Eliot's _Spanish Gypsy_--in 1868. The third instalment, dictated in the autumn of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the posthumous _The Middle Years_, faultlessly edited by the piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in 1917. Here the tale is taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much attempt at chronological order, with memories of two years in London. As Henry James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read, these pages, we are free to form our conclusion as to whether he would or would not have vouchsafed to put their disjected parts into some more anatomical order.