historic pleasure in the chronicles of Nero’s eccentricities, will find ‘Rodney Stone’ objectionable because it chronicles a ‘knuckle fight,’ and because a ‘knuckle fight’ is still occasionally brought off in London, and more occasionally suppressed by the police. But a more serious criticism awaits Dr. Conan Doyle’s last work. It is offered respectfully, and with every admiration for the high qualities already noticed. In the re-embodiment of a bygone age in fiction, three separate and special faculties are to be exercised. The first is the faculty for research, which must expend its energy not merely on the theme in hand, but on the age at large. The second is the imaginative and sympathetic faculty, which alone can make the dry bones of social history live again. The third is the faculty of self-repression, the power to cast away all which, however laboriously acquired, is dramatically unessential. Two of these powers belong in generous measure to Dr. Conan Doyle. The third, which is as necessary to complete success, he has not yet displayed. In ‘Rodney Stone’ an attempt has been made to cover up this shortcoming, in the form in which the story has been cast, and in the very choice of its title. But when the book comes to be read it is not the tale of Rodney Stone (who is a mere outsider privileged to narrate), but of his fashionable uncle’s combat with Sir Lothian Hume, with the ring in which their separate champions appear as a battle ground. Many pages are crowded with people who are named in passing and forgotten. They have no influence on the narrative, and no place in it. Their presence assuredly displays a knowledge of the time and its chronicles, but they are just so many obstacles to the clear run of the story, and no more. This is the chief fault to be found with the book, but it is a grave fault, and the writer, if he is to take the place which his powers and his industry alike join in claiming for him, must learn to cast ‘as rubbish to the void’ many a painfully acquired bit of knowledge. To be an antiquary is one thing, and to be an antiquarian romancer is another. Dr. Doyle has aimed at being both one and the other in the same pages. A true analogy may be taken from the stage, where the supernumeraries are not allowed to obscure the leading lady and gentleman at any moment of action.