The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon. “Somehow,” says the critic, who, naturally, is a book-reviewer, “one does not associate blue eyes with a vampire.” Of course it did not occur to him that this was doubtless the very reason why the author chose the epithet—if he thought of anybody’s conception but his own. “Blue-eyed” connotes beauty and gentleness; the picture is that of a lovely, fair-haired woman with the telltale blood about her lips. Nothing could be less horrible; nothing more terrible. As vampires do not really exist, everyone is at liberty, I take it, to conceive them under what outward and visible aspect he will; but this gentleman, having standardized the vampire, naturally resents any departure from the type—his type. I fancy he requires goggle-eyes, emitting flame and perhaps smoke, a mouth well garnished with tusks—long claws, and all the other appurtenances that make the conventional Chinese dragon so awful that one naturally wishes to meet it and kick it. Between my mind and the minds of those whom Mr. Sterling’s daring incursions into the realm of the unreal do not affect with a keen artistic delight there is nothing in common—except a part of my vocabulary. I cannot hope to convince nor persuade them. Nevertheless, it is no trouble to point out that their loud pretense of being “shocked” by some of his fancies is a singularly foolish one. We are not shocked by the tragic, the terrible, even the ghastly, in literature and art. We do not flee from the theater when a tragedy is enacting—the murder of Duncan and the sleeping grooms—the stabbing and poisoning in “Hamlet.” We listen without discomposure to the beating to death of Nancy Sykes behind the scenes. The Ancient Mariner’s dead comrades rise and pull at the ropes without disturbing the reader; even the “slimy things” “crawl with legs upon a slimy sea” and we do not pitch the book into the fire. Dante’s underworld, with all its ingenious horrors, page after page of them, are accounted pretty good reading—at least Dante is accounted a pretty good poet. No one stands forth to affirm his distress when Homer’s hero declares that Swarms of specters rose from deepest hell With bloodless visage and with hideous yell. They scream, they shriek; sad groans and dismal sounds Stun my scared ears and pierce Hell’s utmost bounds. Literature is full of pictures of the terrible, the awful, the ghastly, if you please; hardly a great author but has given them to us in prose or verse. They shock nobody, for they produce no illusion, not even on the stage, or the canvases of Vereshchagin. If they did they would be without artistic value. But it is the fashion to pretend to be horrified—when the terrible thing is new and by an unfamiliar hand. The Philistine who accepts without question the horrors of Dante’s Hell professes himself greatly agitated when Sterling’s