I have written Short-story with a capital S and a hyphen because I wished to emphasize the distinction between the Short-story and the story which is merely short. The Short-story is a high and difficult department of fiction. The story which is short can be written by anybody who can write at all; and it may be good, bad, or indifferent, but at its best it is wholly unlike the Short-story. In "An Editor's Tales" Trollope has given us excellent specimens of the story which is short; and the stories which make up this book are amusing enough and clever enough, but they are wanting in the individuality and in the completeness of the genuine Short-story. Like the brief tales to be seen in the English monthly magazines and in the Sunday editions of American newspapers into which they are copied, they are, for the most part, either merely amplified anecdotes or else incidents which might have been used in a Novel just as well as not. Now, the genuine Short-story abhors the idea of the Novel. It can be conceived neither as part of a Novel nor as elaborated and expanded so as to form a Novel. A good Short-story is no more the synopsis of a Novel than it is an episode from a Novel. A slight Novel, or a Novel cut down, is a Novelette: it is not a Short-story. Mr. Howells's "Their Wedding Journey" and Miss Howard's "One Summer" are Novelettes, although an American editor, who had offered a prize for a list of the ten best Short-stories, allowed them to be included. Mr. Anstey's "Vice Versa," Mr. Besant's "Case of Mr. Lucraft," and Mr. Hugh Conway's "Called Back" are Short-stories in conception, although they are without the compression which the Short-story requires. In the acute and learned essay on _vers de société_ which Mr. Frederick Locker prefixed to his admirable "Lyra Elegantiarum," he declared that the two characteristics of the best _vers de société_ were brevity and brilliancy, and that "The Rape of the Lock" would be the type and model of the best _vers de société_--if it were not just a little too long. So it is with "The Case of Mr. Lucraft," with "Vice Versa," with "Called Back:" they are just a little too long.