The worthiest of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much in common with him, though he displays differences of a very essential kind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. He has the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably rather habitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies in the fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal with a bygone form of life, a form of life which he is too young to remember in all its intricacies, whilst he is not too young to have heard of it plenteously at first hand, or to have known many of its exemplars. Few things of so happy a sort can befall a child of imagination as to be born on such a borderland of time. About him is the atmosphere of the new, and dotted every here and there around him are the living mementoes of the old--a dying age, which in a little while will cease to be, and is already out of date and romantic. Steam and electricity and the printing-press, and the universal provider and the cheap clothing ‘emporium,’ have worked strange changes. It was Mr. Barrie’s fortune to begin to look on life when all these changes were not yet wrought; to bring an essentially modern mind to bear on the contemplation of a vanishing and yet visible past, to live with the quaint, yet to be able, by mere force of contrast, to recognise its quaintness, and to be in close and constant and familiar touch with those to whom the disappearing forms of life had been wholly habitual. That the mere environment thus indicated was the lot of hundreds of thousands makes little difference to the especial happiness of the chance, for, as I have said already, we can’t all be persons of genius, and it is only to the man of genius that, the good fortune comes home.