I have no purpose here to rehearse the merits of Mr. Ford’s various writings. Current criticism certainly has him in its eye as a conspicuous figure, and if he meets opposition he is not likely to suffer neglect. Meanwhile another source of his success and of his popularity seems to me to lie in his perfect intellectual and moral normality. Great as is the volume of his work, it is sound throughout. He strikes no shrill or wayward note; the social order is always considered. He deals with the sound fruit of human life, and assumes that good nature, honest love, money-making, clean and enjoyable existence are not only possibilities but everyday realities. The success of “The Story of an Untold Love” shows how ready people are for an observance of all the commandments rather than for a breach of one. It is with novels as with plays--cleanliness “goes.” Mr. Ford’s large abilities, aided by fortunate inheritance, have been used not for the ends of mere scholarship and to humor preciosity and a love of what is fantastic and occasional, but to recognize common wants and aspirations; yet at the same time he evinces an idealism tempered by no little terrestrial wisdom and experience. Imagination plays a larger part in his work--and I am here speaking of his creative work--than appears at first sight. In “Peter Stirling” he has managed to give to an immense metropolitan life an effect of homogeneity and interrelation. The large and evanescent effects of a great city are tempting themes, but those who try to catch and hold the impression for the uses of a novel seldom succeed in giving more than fine details. Our _genre_ painters of fiction have been admirable in this matter: but to make one pattern of the huge confusion requires a knowledge vouchsafed only to him who has acquired by daily contact the largest and most vital experiences. The immensity of financial transactions, the intricate shrewdness of politicians, aside from their corruptions, the nice checks and balances of a higher social life must necessarily escape the eye of the literary artist mainly because they lie beyond his ken. Cerebrally Mr. Ford is multiparous. He can be busy with a play, a story, a biography, and with editing some historical work during the same interval of time--the real marvel of it all being that, when these come to publication, the world, which is said to know clearly what it wants, accepts the results with apparent satisfaction. The power of driving a quadriga of new books around the popular arena amid no little applause, is due, I think, to qualities not inherent in the literary mind as such, but implying a wider mental grasp.