“Oceana,” and in such brief essays as “An Italian Critic,” “Two Views of Shelley,” “George Sand and Diderot,” etc. His contributions to other periodicals have been numerous. His articles in _The Nation_, _Literary World_, _Current_, _Independent_, _Home Journal_, _Lippincott’s_, _Manhattan_, _Overland Monthly_, _American Journal of Philology_, _Anglia_, etc., would fill several volumes. Two charming stories--“P’tit-José-Ba’tiste,” a Creole story, and “Dieudonnée,” a West Indian Creole story--testify to his skill in this kind of writing. Since 1895 he has been professor of English and Romance languages in the University of Virginia. Several trips to different parts of Europe, visits to Alaska, British America, Mexico, and the West Indies, during which he studied the languages as well as the customs of the peoples, have given him many a “peep over the edge of things.” W. M. BASKERVILL. COL. JOHN HAY COL. JOHN HAY IN WASHINGTON It was a happy thought that inspired _The Critic’s_ series of Authors at Home. The very idea was benevolence. One of its charms is the reader’s sense of mutuality--reciprocity. Has not Col. Hay, for instance, been a welcomed guest beneath many, many roof-trees, beside many, many hearthstones; and are his own doors to be shut with a “Procul, O procul este, profani!”? One can fancy the gratitude of posterity for these contemporary sketches of those whose lips have been touched and tongues loosened by the song-inspirer--of those who have “instructed our ignorance, elevated our platitudes, brightened our dullness, and delighted our leisure.” For the lack of a _Critic_ in the past, how little we know of those authors at home whom we forgather with in imagination! A scrap of this memoir, that biography, and yonder letter, makes a ragged picture at best. There was only one Boswell, and he, as Southey says, has gone to heaven for his “Johnson,” if ever a man went there for his good works. The mind’s eye, of course, pictures Rogers at one of his famous breakfasts; the galaxy at Holland House; Coleridge monotoning, with Lamb furnishing puns for periods; “smug Sydney,” ten miles from a lemon, scattering pearls before Yorkshire swine; Dr. Johnson at Thrale’s, drinking tea and bullying his betters; Dryden enthroned at the Kit-kat; but all the portraits, save those by Boswell, are unsatisfactory--mere outlines without coloring, and lacking that essential background, the “at home.”