I will say of myself that I value style beyond most things; and that if I could command it, I should be glad to write for so small an audience, the “fit though few,” that the best-selling lists should never know me again; for with style go many of the requisites of great fiction,--fineness and sureness of feeling, and a power over language by which characters cease to be bobbing marionettes and become veritable beings, no matter whether they are Beatrix Esmonds, or strutting D’Artagnans, or rascally Bartley Hubbards, or luckless Lily Barts. To toss a ball into the air, and keep it there, as Stevenson did so charmingly in such pieces as “Providence and the Guitar,”--this is a respectable achievement; to mount Roy Richmond as an equestrian statue,--that, too, is something we would not have had Mr. Meredith leave undone. Mr. Rassendyll, an English gentleman playing at being king, thrills the surviving drop of mediævalism that is in all of us. “The tired business man” yields himself to the belief that the staccato of hoofs on the asphalt street, which steals in to him faintly at his fireside, is really an accompaniment to the hero’s mad ride to save the king. Ah, the joy in kings dies hard in us! Given a sprightly tale with a lost message to recover, throw in a fight on the stair, scatter here and there pretty dialogues between the lover and the princess he serves, and we are all, as we breathlessly follow, the rankest royalists. Tales of real Americans, kodaked “in the sun’s hot eye,” much as they refresh me,--I speak of myself now, not as a writer or critic, but as the man in the street,--never so completely detach the weary spirit from mundane things as tales of events that never were on sea or land. Why should I read of Silas Lapham to-night, when only an hour ago I was his competitor in the mineral-paint business? The greatest fiction must be a criticism of life; but there are times when we crave forgetfulness, and lift our eyes trustfully to the flag of Zenda. But the creator of Zenda, it is whispered, is not an author of the first or even of the second rank, and the adventure story, at its best, is only for the second table. I am quite aware of this. But pause a moment, O cheerless one! Surely Homer is respectable; and the Iliad, the most strenuous, the most glorious and sublime of fictions, with the very gods drawn into the moving scenes, has, by reason of its tremendous energy and its tumultuous drama, not less than for its majesty as literature, established its right to be called the longest-selling fiction of the ages.