The life of the closely related peasant stock of Austria has found hardly at any other hands than those of the Tirolese Karl Schönherr an equally unadorned depiction. Rosegger's Styrian peasants are, in spite of the pessimistic _Sylvan Schoolmaster_, drawn after all with much more extenuating gentleness. More recent literary products of Styrian writers are, however, no whit inferior in local patriotism to the works of the still living first master. The warmest praise of his home land has been sung by Rudolf Hans Bartsch who, born in 1873 at Graz, lived for many years as an officer in Vienna, until in 1911 he returned as a retired captain to his native city. After an historical novel _When Austria Disintegrated_ (1905), which dealt with the epoch of Forty-eight, and was reissued under the title _The Last Student_, Bartsch celebrated his greatest triumph with the novel _Twelve Men of Styria_ (1908), a book of inexhaustible, exuberant youthfulness and contagious optimism. The careers of the twelve youths who meet on the common ground of love for the beautiful Frau von Karminell, and who set out together on the stormy path of life, are only loosely connected; and yet the book achieves a unified effect, thanks to the wonderful musical atmosphere which is its element, and to the pivotal position in it of province and city: "Graz, city lost in the expanse of nature, so still, so receptive and yet fulfilled as no other is with soft impressiveness; the green-dreaming, tree-rustling, gentle-singing city of Graz, animate beyond all great cities with the soul of nature." The next novel, _The Sons of Haindl_ (1908), a collection of similar types of character in Viennese surroundings, is too much of a repetition not to have proved a disappointment; as was also _The German Sorrow_ (1911). In the later Viennese novels _Elisabeth Kött_ (1909) and _The Story of Hannah and her Four Lovers_ (1914) Bartsch lost much of his original vivacity and purity of style, and the novel _Schwammerl_ (1912), which revolves about the figure of the composer Schubert, falls in with the vogue of that novel of the artistic life which has of late been cultivated in somewhat routine fashion and to which--to mention only a few names--Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer, Lenau, Wagner, and Heine in his last years, succumbed. Bartsch was indeed led to this theme by an elective affinity; for he is inspired in equal measure by love of music and love for Old Vienna, and he is capable of entering with entire sympathy into the spirit of former times. To this capacity his short stories entitled _The Last Days of Rococo_ (1909) bear eloquent testimony, conjuring up as they do with charming winsomeness the spirit of the epoch that preceded the French Revolution. The second collection of narratives, _Bitter-Sweet Love Stories_ (1910), brings us back to Austrian territory. To this collection belongs _The Styrian Wine Carrier_, in which the ancient carefree joyfulness of the highway