gardens to the far-shining Loire, and with what peculiar wonder Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description. The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James' essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have produced _Madame Bovary_, is just such an ironic happening as he would have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James' reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great criticism. It is true that _French Poets and Novelists_ are the best reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author gossiping in _Notes on Novelists_ (1914) about the authors he had known long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an intelligent essay on Theophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his aesthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the _Antigone_ at Munich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him