Mr. Beerbohm is, in the opinion of some good critics, best of all as a parodist. His _Christmas Garland_ contains the finest prose parodies in the language. And, even outside his confessed parodies, he remains a parodist in the greater part of his work. In _Seven Men_ he is both a parodist of Henry James and a caricaturist of men of letters. Henry James loved to take a man of letters as his hero: Mr. Beerbohm loves to take a man of letters as a figure of fun. His men of letters have none of that dignity with which they are invested in “The Death of a Lion.” They are simply people to tell amusing stories about, as monarchs and statesmen become at a dinner-table. This does not mean that Mr. Beerbohm is not a devoted disciple of literature. There is a novelist, Maltby, in one of his stories, who lives in the suburbs and writes a successful novel about aristocratic life, and afterwards writes an unsuccessful novel about suburban life. “I suppose,” he says, explaining his failure, “one can’t really understand what one doesn’t love, and one can’t make good fun without real understanding.” We may reasonably take this as Mr. Beerbohm’s own apologia. He has a sincere tenderness for this world he derides. In _A Christmas Garland_ he protests his admiration for the victims of his parodies. And as we read _Seven Men_ we feel sure that it is his extreme devotion to the world of letters that leads him to choose it as the theme of his mockery. When he writes of men of letters--especially of the exquisitely minor men of letters--he is like a man speaking his own language in his own country. When he wanders outside the world of authors he writes under a sense of limitations, like a man venturing into a foreign tongue. In _Seven Men_ the least remarkable of the five stories--though it, too, would seem remarkable in any less brilliant company--is “James Pethel,” the story of a financier, who lives for the sake of risks and who is happiest when he is risking not only himself but those he loves--his daughter, for instance, or a favourite author. The description of a motor drive, on which he takes his wife and daughter and Mr. Beerbohm in Normandy, with its many hair-breadth escapes, is an excellent piece of comico-sensational literature. But the story reads like hearsay, not like reminiscences of a man’s own world. One does not believe that Pethel ever existed, or that he enjoyed drinking water in France simply because there was a risk of typhoid. Even the motor drive is not quite “convincing.” Or, perhaps, one should say that, while the motor drive itself is immensely convincing, James Pethel’s state of mind as he drives the car is not. Henry James might have made of him a queer study in morbid psychology. Mr. Beerbohm has hardly raised him above the level of a joke. It lacks the thrill of masterly and intimate portraiture. “A. V. Laider” is another story with a non-literary theme. It is, perhaps, the most refined example of leg-pulling in fiction. It