sealed books to Protestants.” As to my friend’s summing up Crawford as a cosmopolitan, in the every-day meaning of that word, I take issue. Cosmopolitan novelist is one who can produce a three-volume novel, whose scenes are laid in all the great centers of commerce, while he sits calmly in his library. No previous study of his novelistic surroundings are necessary. Does the age want the beginning of the plot in Cairo or Venice, half-way at Tokio, and a grand finale beyond the Gates Ajar? Your novelist is ready to turn out the regulation type with the greatest ease. Cosmopolitan novel-writing is simply a trade. The living through of local and artistic impressions, the study of types in their environment, the color of surroundings are unnecessary. Imagination, divorced from nature study, is left to guide the way. Once Crawford followed this school, and the result was “An American Politician,” the “worst novel ever produced by an American.” Had Crawford been a tradesman he might have produced a passable book, but being an artist, he failed, not knowing what paint to mix in order to get the coloring. The difference between an artist and tradesman, the one must go to nature direct, the other takes her secondhand. No artist can catch the lines of an Italian sunset from a studio window in London. “Art is interpretive, not imitative.” Crawford is only a novelist in the true sense when he knows his characters and their surroundings. This is amply proven in the charming volumes that make his Saracenesca series. Here he is at home, so to speak. The Rome of Pius IX, with its struggles, its ambitions, the designs of wily intriguers, the fall of the temporal power of the Papacy, the rise of an united Italy, the flocking to Rome of the scourings and outcasts of the provincial cities, the money-mad schemes of daring but ignorant speculators, and over all the lovely blue Italian sky, rise before us in all their minuteness at the biddance of Marion Crawford. His work is hardly inferior to genuine history; “for it affords that insight into the human mind, that acquaintance with the spirit of the age, without which the most minute knowledge is only a bundle of dry and meaningless facts.” Who that knows Rome of the Popes and Rome of the Vandals will not feel heavy-hearted at these lines? “Old Rome is dead, too, never to be old Rome again. The last breath has been breathed, the aged eyes are closed forever, corruption has done its work and the grand skeleton lies bleaching on seven hills, half covered with the piecemeal stucco of a modern architectural body. The result is satisfactory to those who have brought it, if not to the rest of the world. The sepulchre of old Rome in the new capital of united Italy.” The exclusiveness of the patrician families of Rome, families that a brood of novelists pretend to draw life-like, is happily hit by the painter Gouache.