its ramifications, and which stretches from Sorrisonde in Poictesme to Lichfield, Virginia (U. S. A.). A genealogist by taste and profession, the author has taken visible pleasure in linking together all his novels with the chain of a pedigree beginning with Dom Manuel the Great and ending with Felix Kennaston. In consequence his work presents itself like a huge _Comédie humaine_ or a new Rougon-Macquart epic issuing forth from an ancestry of mixed French, English and American blood, a startling and most romantic alliance. History and legend are fused and confused in an amazing manner in Cabell’s books. He revived medieval chivalry in a modern travesty full of piquant anachronisms.[52] It took all the erudition of a modern writer and the most refined humor to brew folklore, legend and history together, and to embroil geography and history with such an irreverent finesse. In the cycle of Dom Manuel and Jurgen, the gods of ancient mythology, the saints of the Christian calendar, the fairies, the magicians and the demons of the Fable, joust pell-mell as in a masquerade. Cabell went even farther. Not content with parodying legends he invented new ones to which his erudition succeeded in giving all the signs of verisimilitude. * * * * * The inhabitants of Poictesme are medieval in garb and modern in psychology. They went to school with Rabelais, Voltaire and Anatole France. Here is at last an American writer who can think freely and who does not ignore _gaie science_. Cabell’s philosophy is as attractive and fanciful as the land of Poictesme but there is an acumen of truth under his fancy. It is the philosophy of a man of imagination who cannot digest truth without many bits of salt. It has been propounded _ex professo_ in two suggestive books, “Beyond Life,” and “Straws and Prayer-books.” Cabell does not lead a direct attack against Puritanism, but he uses backhand Parthian arrows which are none the less deadly. He leaves his visiting card in passing through Philistia and the Kingdom of Mother Dunce. He speaks freely and little respectfully of Demagogy, and makes frequent and transparent allusions to current events. This poet is a satirist. His warfare against Philistinism has taken the form of a defense of fiction.