It is not the simplicity of suburban life which is at fault. Simplicity in writing, or in character, is as difficult of attainment as it is worth the attaining. And in so far as simplicity here exists--character cut on elemental lines, or occupied with elemental things--it provides an antidote to the complexities or cynicisms of other classes. No one, except the vulgar, despises a Middle Class existence because it has substituted a high tea for an elaborate dinner, because it uses speech to reveal rather than to conceal thought, or because it refuses to torture itself with analysis and emotion which are the products of mind divorced from the ancient sanities of existence. Nor, again, is the narrow separation from poverty and the abyss a cause for any legitimate contempt, which makes the business of life for so many of them in their tiny two-storeyed villas an enterprise hazardous and insecure. Rather is the observer conscious, where this struggle exists, that there has entered into the atmosphere the breath of salt wind, bracing if austere, which can provide a more heroic sustenance than the atmosphere in which such tests and challenges are denied. We may compare, for example, two of Mr. Bullock’s stories of suburban life; the one, in which he traces the attempt of a “twopenny clerk” to provide for the needs of a family on an exiguous and precarious income; the other, in which a prosperous family who have attained security set themselves to the business of living under such favourable conditions. There is humour in the struggles of Robert Thorne, as of all similar millions of Robert Thornes, in his attempt to maintain his hardly-won standard of decencies and modest comfort. There is resistance to hard circumstance which the most critical onlooker will applaud--in the little boxes for the division of income, labelled “Necessities,” “Outings,” “Savings”--the first so rarely permitting any overflow into the second and third; in the revolt against the shabby clothes and difficulties created by unexpected illness; in the necessities of a clerk, who is also a man, wheeling the perambulator on Peckham Rye, or scrubbing the front doorsteps furtively after nightfall. But the humour is of the ancient, not of the modern, significance; a humour not without tears in it, with admiration also at the courage and determination which could yet be content, and under such conditions, with “the glory of going on and still to be.” For here is the sense of battles; and battle, whether against deliberate foes, against the inimical force of Nature, or the indifference of the crowd to the individual survival, is always stimulating and bracing. And it is the battle depicted by Mr. Davidson in his “thirty bob a week”; the “naked child against a hungry wolf,” “the playing bowls upon a splitting wreck,” “daily done by many and many a one” in a tenacious struggle, against the enemies of human welfare, which illuminates and glorifies the monotonous streets of