Mr. William Lyon Phelps is the most art-predatory of non-æsthetic pedants. It is good to be interested in everything, from the history of pins to the color of pills preferred by potentates, pugilists, or pedagogues. Coelho Netto, of Rio, is a person. There are not too many! He is peculiarly versatile. He has been physician and surgeon, lawyer, lecturer upon art and letters in great universities, politician, reporter, and writer of many volumes of successful plays which still hold the stage in both Brazil and Portugal. In addition, he is a novelist and prolific short story writer, and one of the first in his tongue, in South America, to gain a livelihood solely by art. The difficulty of living by the pen, in Rio, in an early day was set down by a Portuguese journalist as follows: “They say Brazil has thirteen millions of people. Of these twelve millions eight hundred thousand can not read. Of the two hundred thousand that remain, one hundred and fifty thousand read only daily papers; fifty thousand, only French books; thirty thousand, translations. The other fifteen thousand read the Catechism and the Prayer Book; two thousand study Comte. And one thousand read Portuguese books made in Brazil.” He was one of the earliest artists to show the native life of the land outside the cities, together with man’s effort to contend with the resisting tropic wilderness. He has shown every class of this richly varied life in his extensive country. _Tormenta_ is a novel of a young physician, which perhaps is reminiscent of his own youth. _Sertão_ is a collection of prose _acquarelles_ of Brazil’s colonizing days, with interesting pictures of the vast, the varied interior. Here we see storms so violent, they are almost unbelievable, like a deluge, and which last for days; then the long dry seasons, and the measureless, solitary pastures; the encrusted gold of sunsets unimpeded over disconcerting levels; and the grey and melancholy dawns. One of his most powerful novels, the one I perhaps admire most, is _Rei Negro_. It shows life on a lonely estate in the interior and the confusing conflict, then blending, of black and white races. It is a pathetic, moving story one is forced to remember, of a beautiful woman of the tropics cursed with double race blood and a Negro who was a hero. _O Capital Federal_ contains enchanting sketches of Rio, and likewise detailed descriptions of existence on a _fazenda_, in the country, where the luxury is so great, so unexpected, it sets one dreaming of the pleasure places of Tiberius, in the south of Italy. This novel, _O Capital Federal_, is dedicated to his uncle as follows: “My Uncle: In this book there are pages that belong to you, because I never should have written them had not my Good Fairy guided me to the ascetic but voluptuous retreat where you live in happy tranquility, following the moral law of Epicurus, and treasuring your flowers.”