Of course I do not pretend that literary mendacity began under Dr. Holland, for the _Ledger_ school was a highly imaginative one, at best; but the vein of untruth which is found cropping out from time to time during the eighth decade has proved infinitely more harmful to modern literature than were the lurid and confessedly improbable tales of bandits and haunted castles and splendid foreign noblemen which found so many eager readers a score of years ago. The aristocratic circles of English society which were enlivened by the nebulous presence of Lady Chetwynde’s spectre were so far removed from those in which the spellbound hay-maker, who read about them, had his being that it made very little difference to him--or to literary art either--whether they were truthfully portrayed or not; but the mendacious and meretricious literature which we find in the Holland period is more pretentious in its imitation of truth, and therefore all the more dangerous. It was within a year after the first number of _Scribner’s_ had been issued that Dr. Holland began the publication of a series of papers, afterward printed in book form, which deserve special mention here because they are so thoroughly characteristic of the period in which they saw the light. They are known to the world as _Back-log Studies_, and the average reader of ordinary intelligence will tell you that Mr. Warner’s book is “delightful reading,” that he possesses a “dainty style,” and that his studies of the open fireplace are “fresh, original, and altogether charming.” Now did you ever happen to read _The Reveries of a Bachelor_? If you did you will admit that there was very little left in an open fire when Ik Marvel got through with it; and if you have also read _Back-log Studies_ in the conscientious, critical way in which all books should be read, then you will agree with me in my opinion that Mr. Warner found very little to say about it that had not already been much better said by Marvel. The book is neither fresh nor original nor charming, but it imitates those qualities so artistically and successfully that it has won for itself a unique place in the literature of a period in which the _Ledger_ and the Holland schools of fiction may be said to have struggled for the supremacy. I do not call _Back-log Studies_ mendacious. They are merely imitative, and deserve mention here only because they were put together with so much cleverness that nearly the whole of the reading public has been deluded into believing them wholly original and of a high order of merit.