wince: you can always read his works aloud, the deadly and unfailing test of anything flat or pinchbeck in literature. His gift of humor saves him from this: true humor and true pathos are always found together because they are not two but one, twin aspects of the very same events. He who sees the ludicrous in misfits must see their sadness too; he who can laugh at a tumble must grieve over it: both are inevitable and both are coincident. As a literary artist, he belongs in the foremost rank. He has that sense of the typical in incident, of the universal in feeling, and of the suggestive in language, which mark the chiefs of letters. No one can express an idea with fewer strokes; he never expands a sufficient hint into an essay. His management of the Scotch dialect is masterly: he uses it sparingly, in the nearest form to English compatible with retaining the flavor; he never makes it so hard as to interfere with enjoyment; in few dialect writers do we feel so little alienness. 'Auld Licht Idylls' is a set of regular descriptions of the life of "Thrums," with special reference to the ways and character of the "Old Lights," the stubborn conservative Scotch Puritans; it contains also a most amusing and characteristic love story of the sect (given below), and a satiric political skit. 'A Window in Thrums' is mainly a series of selected incidents in detail, partly from the point of view of a crippled woman ("Jess"), sitting at her window and piecing out what she sees with great shrewdness from her knowledge of the general current of affairs, aided by her daughter "Leeby." 'The Little Minister' is developed from the real story of a Scotch clergyman who brought home a wife from afar, of so alien a sort to the general run that the parish spent the rest of her short life in speculating on her previous history and weaving legends about her. Barrie's imagined explanation is of Arabian-Nights preposterousness of incident, and indeed is only a careless fairy-tale in substance; but it is so rich in delicious filling, so full of his best humor, sentiment, character-drawing, and fine feeling, that one hardly cares whether it has any plot at all. 'Sentimental Tommy' is a study of a sensitive mobile boy, a born _poseur_, who passes his life in cloud-castles where he always dramatizes himself as the hero, who has no continuity of purpose, and no capacity of self-sacrifice except in spasms of impulse, and in emotional feeling which is real to itself; a spiritual Proteus who deceives even himself, and only now and then recognizes his own moral illusiveness, like Hawthorne's scarecrow-gentleman before the mirror: but with the irresistible instincts also of the born literary creator and constructor. The other characters are drawn with great power and truth.