in the days when a cylinder with four pegs is as good a steed as the finest animal in the Elgin marbles, and when a puddle swarming with tadpoles or a streamlet haunted by water-rats is as full of romance as a jungle full of tigers, the barest catalogue of facts is the most effective. A child is deliciously excited by 'Robinson Crusoe' because De Foe is content to give the naked scaffolding of direct narrative, and leaves his reader to supply the sentiment and romance at pleasure. Who does not fear, on returning to the books which delighted his childhood, that all the fairy-gold should have turned to dead leaves? I remember a story told in some forgotten book of travels, which haunted my dreams, and still strikes me as terribly impressive. I see a traveller benighted by some accident in a nullah where a tiger has already supped upon his companion, and listening to mysterious sounds, as of fiendish laughter, which he is afterwards cruel enough to explain away by some rationalising theory as to gases. How or why the traveller got into or emerged from the scrape, I know not; but some vague association of ferocious wild beasts and wood-demons in ghastly and haunted solitudes has ever since been excited in me by the mention of a nullah. It is as redolent of awful mysteries as the chasm in 'Kubla Khan.' And it is painful to reflect that a nullah may be a commonplace phenomenon in real life; and that the anecdote might possibly affect me no more, could I now read it for the first time, than one of the tremendous adventures recorded by Mr. Kingston or Captain Mayne Reid. As we become less capable of supplying the magic for ourselves, we require it from our author. He must have the art—the less conscious the better—of placing us at his own point of view. He should, if possible, be something of a 'humourist,' in the old-fashioned sense of the word; not the man who compounds oddities, but the man who is an oddity; the slave, not the master, of his own eccentricities; one absolutely unconscious that the strange twist in his mental vision is not shared by mankind, and capable, therefore, of presenting the fancies dictated by his idiosyncrasy as if they corresponded to obvious and generally recognised realities; and of propounding some quaint and utterly preposterous theory, as though it were a plain deduction from undeniable truths. The modern humourist is the old humourist _plus_ a consciousness of his own eccentricity, and the old humourist is the modern humourist _minus_ that consciousness. The order of his ideas should not (as philosophers would have it) be identical with the order of things, but be determined by odd arbitrary freaks of purely personal association.