His tale, garnished with many other mysterious matters, soon speeded expedition after expedition, dreaming across those "perilous seas In fairyland forlorn." All came back with marvels on their tongues. All had caught glimpses of the gilded domes of the city, but that was all. Gonzales Ximinez de Quesada from Santa Fé de Bogotá was "warmest," perhaps; but he too failed. Many a daring sailor since has vainly gone on a like quest. Even in our prosaic times--in the true Elizabethan spirit, that, for all their romance, actually animated those enterprises of old time--when men sought real gold as now, not "faery-gold"--an enterprise, with a prospectus, shareholders, and those dreams now known as promised dividends, has made it its serious "incorporated" business to go in quest of El Dorado. But, elaborate as all previous expeditions and enterprises have been, and dauntless as the courage of the individual explorer, one and all have failed--till now. Till now, I say--for at last El Dorado _has_ been discovered, and it is my proud privilege to announce, for the first time, the name of its discoverer--Dr. Clifford Smyth. Dr. Smyth has chosen the medium of fiction for the publication of his discovery, like other such eminent discoverers as the authors of _Erewhon_ and _Utopia_, but that fact, I need hardly say, in nowise invalidates the authenticity and serious importance of his discovery. Though truth be stranger than fiction, it has but seldom its charm, and, to use the by-gone phrase, Dr. Smyth's relation of happenings which we never doubt for a rapt moment did happen "reads as entertainingly as a fiction." In fact, the present writer--who confesses to the idleness of keeping _au courant_ with the good and even merely advertised fiction of the day, recalls no fiction in some years that has seemed to him comparable in imaginative quality with _The Gilded Man_, or has given him, in any like degree, the special kind of delight which Dr. Smyth's narrative has given him. For any such thrill as the latter part of the book in particular holds, he finds that his memory must travel back, no difficult or lengthy journey, to Mr. Rider Haggard's _King Solomon's Mines_--a book which one sees more and more taking its place as one of the classics of fantastic romance, the kind of romance which combines adventure with poetic strangeness; though, at its publication, "superior persons," with the notable exception of that paradoxical most superior person, and man of genius, Andrew Lang, disdained it as a passing "thriller."