The ending of _Alice-for-Short_ is accomplished only by notes, comment, and citations. And _Somehow Good_ is simply snipped off, when it might conceivably have proceeded on its way. His fourth novel is the only one that ends as well as it begins. [1] _Léon Tolstoi: Vie et OEuvres. Mémoires par P. Birukov. Traduction Française_, Tome III, p. 177. You cannot judge books, any more than you can individuals, by the first words they say. If I could only discover somewhere some man, woman, or child who had not read _Joseph Vance_, I should like to tell him the substance of the first chapter, and ask him to guess what sort of a story had awakened my enthusiasm. Suppose some person who had never heard of Browning should stumble on _Pauline_, and read the first three lines:-- "Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast Shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes, And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms" one sees the sharp look of expectation on the reader's face, and one almost laughs aloud to think what there is in store for him. He will very soon exhibit symptoms of bewilderment, and before he has finished the second page he will push the book aside with an air of pious disappointment. No slum story ever opened more promisingly than _Joseph Vance_. We are led at the very start into a dirty rum-shop; there immediately ensues a fight between two half-drunken loafers in the darkness without; this results in the double necessity of the police and the hospital; and a broken bottle, found against a dead cat, is the missile employed to destroy a human eye. In _Alice-for-Short_, the first chapter shows us a ragged little girl of six carrying a jug of beer from a public-house to a foul basement, where dwell her father and mother, both victims of alcohol. The police again. On the third page of _Somehow Good_, we have the "fortune to strike on a rich vein of so-called life in a London slum." The hero gives a drunken, murderous scoundrel a "blow like the kick of a horse, that lands fairly on the eye socket with a cracking concussion that can be heard above the tumult, and is followed by a roar of delight from the male vermin." Once more the police. _It Never Can Happen Again_ begins in a corner of London unspeakably vile.