are more startling, though not so startling as their friends and critics. Looking about then, with no unfriendly eye, we shall discover that audacity, not of the worst kind, is to be found in much of the best known work of to-day. It is not everywhere: there is little or no trace of it in the work of Hardy, Bridges, Henry James, Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Galsworthy, Maurice Hewlett, to name only a few. But elsewhere, though mingled with other finer qualities, there is no lack of it. It takes many strange shapes, and can be discovered lurking under many disguises. It has proved itself no small part of Bernard Shaw’s stock-in-trade. It roars lustily through the essays and ‘histories’ of Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton, peeps slyly from Max Beerbohm’s essays, screams in the devastating contributions of H. G. Wells, leers through George Moore’s endless reminiscences. It drove Arnold Bennett to write essays, and is now urging John Drinkwater to create dramas. After being long the servant, it is now the master of Barrie. There is no end to it. Fortunately, these are not gentlemen of one characteristic alone; they do not content themselves with crying ‘ducdame,’ for they have still something to say when the circle is formed. But there are others, novelists, verse-writers, critics, and what editors call ‘publicists,’ who think to run their course with nothing to speed them but audacity alone, which makes them doubly audacious, but nothing more. The drums beat, the trumpets sound, the crowd is hushed, and then follows a cough and a splutter--and then silence.