Continental authors. Few of us have read Kolniyatch in “the original Gibrisch,” but Mr. Beerbohm’s description of his work and personality makes it clear that he was an author compared with whom Dostoievsky and Strindberg were serene and saccharine: Of the man himself--for on several occasions I had the privilege and the permit to visit him--I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories. His was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse to spring at one’s throat. After this comes “No. 2, The Pines”--yes, this is Mr. Beerbohm’s masterpiece, too. Everybody writes well about Swinburne, but Mr. Beerbohm writes better than anybody else--better, if possible, even than Mr. Lucas. What other writer could drive respect and mockery tandem with the same delicate skill? Mr. Beerbohm sees the famous Putney household not only with the comic sense, but through the eyes of a literary youth introduced for the first time into the presence of immortals. The Pines may be a Lewis-Carroll Wonderland, but it is still a wonderland, as he recalls that first meal at the end of the long table--“Watts-Dunton between us very low down over his plate, very cosy and hirsute, and rather like the Dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as Alice sat. And, had the Hare been a great poet, and the Hatter a great gentleman, and neither of them mad but each one only very odd and vivacious, I might see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.”