As I write I have before me a letter of Mr. Barrie’s, written to a fellow-workman, in which he speaks of the ‘almost unbearable pathos’ of an incident in one of the latter’s pages. The phrase seems to fit accurately that chapter in the ‘Window in Thrums’ where Jamie, after his fall in London, returns to his old home, and finds his own people dead and scattered. The story is simple, and the style is severe even to dryness, but every word is like a nail driven home. It would be hard to find in merely modern work a chapter written with a more masterly economy of means, than this. And this economy of means is the most striking characteristic of Mr. Barrie’s literary style. It is as different from the forced economy of poverty as the wordy extravagance of Miss Corelli is different from the exuberance of Shakspeare. It is a reasoned, laborious, and self-chastening art, and within its own limitations it is art at its acme of achievement What it has set itself to do it has done. These two, then, Dr. George Macdonald and Mr. J. M. Barrie, are the men who worthily carry on, in their separate and distinct fashions, the tradition which Sir Walter established. In a summary like this, where it is understood that at least a loyal effort is being made to recognise and apportion the merits of rival writers, the task of the critic occasionally grows ungrateful. Nothing short of sheer envy can grudge to Mr. Barrie a high meed of praise, but I think that his elder is his better. The younger man’s distinction is very largely due to a fine self-command, a faculty of self-criticism, which in its way cannot easily be overpraised. He has not Stevenson’s exquisite and yet daring appropriateness in the choice of words, but his humour is racier and scarcely less delicate, and in passages of pathos he knows his way straight to the human heart As the invention or discovery of new themes grows day by day less easy--as the bounds of the story-teller’s personal originality are constantly narrowing--the purely literary faculty, the mere craft of authorship in its finer manifestations must of necessity grow more valuable. Mr. Barrie is a captain amongst workmen, and there is little fear that in the final judgment of the public and his peers he will be huddled up with Maclarens and Crocketts, as he sometimes is to-day. But Dr. Mac-donald, though he has not sought for the finenesses of mere literary art with an equal jealousy, has inherited a bigger fortune, and has spent his ownings with a larger hand. He has perhaps narrowed his following by his faithfulness to his own inspiration, but his books are a genuine benefaction to the heart, and no man can read them honestly without drawing from them a spiritual freshness and purity of the rarer sort. There is an old story of a discussion among the students of their time as to the relative merits of Schiller and Goethe, The dispute came to Schiller’s ears, and he laughingly advised the