It would have been as well if the author of _Timon le Magnifique_ had hung up his cold shining observations in an essay instead of a story. The display room would have been less obstructed. Occasionally these observations are commonplaces said backwards. He likes to reverse the engine of living. He likes to watch wheels work. To every person his own wheels! A pessimist without passion. A competent observer without conviction. The reading makes me feel that in France the prose of masters is no more. The greater number of French novels I have read recently, and they are many, are unforceful muddy rivulets trickling along slowly, with difficulty, where once roared the diamond-glittering torrents. _De Wandelende Jood_ (The Wandering Jew), by the Flemish writer and critic, August Vermeylen, is worth reading, then remembering. The description of the Crucifixion is superb. It moved me. I felt afresh the world’s Great Drama. It held my mind fascinated for days. It banished inclination to read anything else. The book recalls the powerful painting of old Holland Masters. It is formed plastically like a play, cast in four undivided parts, and it possesses some singular plastic force, something that depends upon form alone. The second part is very fine. It opens with a picture of Ahasuerus after the Crucifixion. It is clean and grim. In some magic heightening of the etched word it shows us the beginning of the curse of wandering, and the indelible flicker across his heart, his mind, of the gentle, the unforgettable smile of Christ: “_Hij ging, het hoofd naar de aschgrauwe aarde gebogen; de hemel daarboven was er mit meer moor hem, hij wilde nietz meer zien. Maar onafwendbaar brande in hem de zachte vlam van Christus._” This shadows forth—this story of the Wandering Jew—the something persistent, super-enduring in the Hebrew race. It is interesting to compare novelists who have written of Rome: Zola’s _Rome_. Serao’s _Conquista de Roma_. Lagerlof’s _Rome_. Pater’s Rome in _Marius_, with its memories of the wolves and snow of winter upon the Alban Hills, and the yellow, luxurious, too lovely winter roses from Carthage; the book’s sumptuous, peculiar spirituality. And the Rome each one builds for himself when he reads Suetonius, _the Twelve Caesars_. Ricarda Huch’s _Rome_. Niebuhr’s _Rome_ is a colossus and the work of a colossus. Bourget’s _Cosmopolis_, which is Rome again.