Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a greater care to the art of expression--to an unbroken continuity of excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who, if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet, in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything we can call Style--in face, actually, of a strange insensibility to it--the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This insensibility--how does it come about? It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast. If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long--the quickness of the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied us--the man in the street would understand that Writing, as much as Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of that suffrage. What _is_ elected is too often the work which presents at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr. Browning once saying, _àpropos_ of such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.