So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind one of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country. One sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destination by the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and paradoxes. That is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry, an author who has often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not say overpraised) by people incompetent to appreciate his true greatness. Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, in an essay called "The Amazing Failure of O. Henry," said that O. Henry created no memorable characters. Mr. Firkins suggests the obvious but satisfying answer--New York itself is his triumph. The New York of O. Henry, already almost erased physically, remains a personality and an identity. Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and a contributing editor of _The Weekly Review_, in which this essay first appeared in September, 1919. The footnotes are, of course, his own. There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The middle class views him as the impersonation of vigor and brilliancy; part of the higher criticism sees in him little but sensation and persiflage. Between these views there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens are _ipso facto_ the demons of Christianity. Unmixed assertions, however, are commonly mixtures of truth and falsehood; there is room to-day for an estimate which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither. There is one literary trait in which I am unable to name any writer of tales in any literature who surpasses O. Henry.[B] It is not primary or even secondary among literary merits; it is less a value _per se_ than the condition or foundation of values. But its utility is manifest, and it is rare among men: Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of its absence in masters of that very branch of art in which its presence would seem to be imperative. I refer to the designing of stories--not to the primary intuition or to skill in development, in both of which finer phases of invention O. Henry has been largely and frequently surpassed, but to the disposition of masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a half-educated American provincial should have been original in a field in which original men have been copyists is enough of itself to make his personality observable.