Dr. Nicoll is a noticeable and interesting personality in contemporary literature. He fully deserves his wide celebrity, for he has put into the chronicling of monotonous literary news and criticism an element of newsyness and vim that is characteristic of the best American journalism. He has made mere literary news as exciting and mysterious as politics or horseracing. We now bet on the sales of new poets as well as on the Derby favorites. This adds a great deal to the picturesqueness and interest of “The Literary Show,” and Dr. Nicoll deserves the credit due to a bold innovator. He marks an epoch in literary journalism, and his “Scotch era” will be remembered in history. But fashions change and Ian Maclaren, and some of Dr. Nicoll’s other inventions and discoveries, will pass into well deserved oblivion, in a very little while. They are significant simply as striking examples of the creative genius of criticism. As “famous authors” they are purely factitious. In a word, they must be considered at par amply as the shadows and phantoms of Dr. Nicoll’s picturesque power of criticism and great creative gifts. The literature of the Kailyard is having its day, but happily it will not last forever. It will eventually go the way of negro dialect fiction, when its unique adaptability as a conveyance for the perfectly obvious and the perfectly absurd come to be more generally recognized than is possible in this hour of perfervid enthusiasm. All the Scots who want to be in the Scotch Sweepstakes and win, had better mount their nags in this hour of favor and get away. A few discerning and canny critics are still alive, and the suspicion is gaining ground among them from a perusal of Ian Maclaren’s pages, that the great literary prophet of Paternoster-Row, while a delightful chroniqueur and a generous soul, is not altogether an infallible judge of the permanent and essential elements of robust and distinctive literature. * * * * * The one man of the Nineteenth Century who will be remembered when all others are forgotten, and whose name will go clattering down the Corridors of Time like a tin kettle to a dog’s tail, is Professor J. Dorman Steele. This man covers all Science and all Philosophy. He has compiled text books on seventeen subjects and over three million volumes of his works have been sold. Darwin, Humboldt, Spencer, Huxley—all fade into misty nothingness when we think of Steele, and bless my soul! what a suggestive name that is anyway!! * * * * * The _Forum_ for March had an article concerning your Uncle Kruger and his folks. It was headed “Manners and Customs of the Boers.” But the compositor got it “Manners and Customs of the Boors,” just as if every one did not know only too well what they were already. I understand that nearly half of the edition was run before the mistake was discovered. * * * * *