Then, in 1908, he turned out another romance of mystery and sensation, “Buried Alive,” and in the same year published “The Old Wives’ Tale,” perhaps the greatest of his books, and one that ranked him unquestionably with the leading novelists of his time. A year later came “Clayhanger,” the first volume in the trilogy which was continued, in 1911, with “Hilda Lessways,” and completed, after a delay of five years, with “They Twain.” This trilogy, with “The Old Wives’ Tale,” and the much more recent “Mr. Prohack,” are Arnold Bennett’s highest achievements in fiction. The first four are stories of disillusion; the romance of them is the drab, poignant romance of unideal love and disappointed marriage, and the humor of them is sharply edged with irony and satire. In “Mr. Prohack” Bennett returns to the more genial mood of “The Card” (1911). Prohack is a delightful, almost a lovable creation, and the Card, with his dry, dour humor, for all his practical hardheadedness, is scarcely less so. Unlike most men, who set out to do one thing and end by doing another, Bennett laid down the plan of his career and has carried it out triumphantly. He is a popular novelist, but, though he cheerfully stooped to conquer and did a lot of miscellaneous writing by the way, while he was building his reputation, the novels that have made him popular are among the masterpieces of latter-day realistic art. And with “Milestones” (in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch) and “The Great Adventure,” to say nothing of his seven or eight other plays, he is a successful dramatist. His versatility is as amazing as his industry. It may be all a matter of talent and commonsense perseverance but he seems to do whatever he chooses with an ease and a brilliance that is very like genius. His list of nearly sixty volumes includes essays, dramas, short stories, several kinds of novel, books of criticism and of travel; he paints deftly and charmingly in water-colors; and if he has written no poetry it is probably because he is too practical to trifle with what is so notoriously unprofitable, for if he decided to write some you may depend upon it he could. He has analyzed “Mental Efficiency” and “The Human Machine” in two of his little books of essays, and illustrated both in his life. JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD [Illustration: JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD] There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the manse and the vicarage that has a notable effect of developing in many who breathe it a capacity for writing fiction. Not a few authors have been cradled into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they lacked in genius.