The state of the art in his own time was a detriment to a far greater story-teller than Brown or Cooper or Scott, to one of the greatest of all story-tellers, to Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ abides as the imperishable monument to his genius, to his wisdom, to his insight, to his humor, to his all-embracing sympathy. None the less is it sprawling in its construction and careless in its composition. There were only two models available for Cervantes when he wrote this masterpiece of fiction, the Romance of Chivalry and its antithesis, the Romance of Roguery—the picaresque tale. The Romance of Chivalry was generally chaotic and involute, with a plot at once complicated and repetitious. The Romance of Roguery, born of an inevitable reaction against the highflown and toplofty unreality of the interminable narratives of knight-errantry, was quite as straggling in its episodes; and it was also addicted to cruel and brutal practical joking. For Cervantes these were unworthy patterns; and he had no other. So it is that the method of ‘Don Quixote’ is sometimes unsatisfactory, even when the manner is always beyond all cavil. Moreover, it is evident that Cervantes builded better than he knew; he seems not to have suspected the transcendent quality of his own work; and therefore he did not take his task as seriously as he might. As it has been well said, Cervantes came too early to profit by Cervantes. How much luckier are the novelists and short-story writers of to-day! The state of the art has advanced to a point unforeseen even a century ago. Whatever theme a writer of fiction may want to treat now, he is never at a loss for a pattern, which will preserve him from the misadventure which befell Cervantes. In its methods, if in nothing else, fiction is a finer art than it was once upon a time. Consider Rudyard Kipling, for example, who is almost infinitely various, and who is always inexpugnably original. Whatever his subject might be, there was always an appropriate pattern at his service; he had only to pick and choose that which best suited his immediate need. Consider Stevenson, again, and how he was able to play the sedulous ape at one time to Scott and Dumas, and at another to Hawthorne and Poe. III