We might say that the representative short-story of this type is a combination of romanticism, realism, metaphysics, and modern journalism. A concentrated extract of the work of Scott, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Reade. The list suggests the history of the novel since Fielding's day and the elements it acquired and transmitted to the short-story. You have probably studied how Scott, when Lord Byron out-ran him, turned from metrical to prose romance; how Scott created with the "Waverley Novels" (which of course are not novels in the usual sense) a new romance, the historical, which immediately took its place as a permanent type of literature. On the side of stirring events our present short-story often epitomises Scott. He said himself he wrote for soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and daring dispositions. There is no limit, therefore, in choice of events. The record may be the most startling. It usually, however, is not extravagant beyond what a healthy and cheerful imagination can enjoy. Our temperance is due no doubt to the restraining influence of Jane Austen and her late followers in realism. She tried to teach her own age to laugh at itself good-naturedly and to bridle romance with common sense. "Northanger Abbey," written in 1798, was a direct satire of the terror school, which was popular before her day and Scott's. Moderns have enthroned Jane Austen as a perfect artist, and all good fiction writers have learned the lesson she taught. In general, her work belongs with the story that emphasizes manners and environment; but her most popular novel, "Pride and Prejudice," has in addition to the reflection of environment a sequence of interesting events and a spiritedness that together make it an extended prototype of the story that emphasizes both character and happenings. To Scott's boldness and Jane Austen's satiric restraint, time added George Eliot's metaphysical curiosity. Since her day we are all interested in duty, destiny, freedom of will, mind-habit. She showed us how a neighborly man becomes a miser, how a miser becomes once more a neighborly man; how a lovable but morally and physically timid man becomes a scoundrel. Most of our short stories now-a-days display an element of such analysis; many of them are wholly constituted upon an inquiry; some, beginning just in front of the crisis, give us a feeling of past complicating events, and with one flash show us the present tangle; others with a swift relentlessness pile happening upon happening until, panting for breath, we stumble upon the momentous climax. Very often, too, at the end, we are left in an atmosphere of pessimism--sometimes it is only a companionable little chill like that Thackeray used to give us, wherein, laughing and chattering, we shake hands with our brothers to keep warm; sometimes, it is like Maupassant's, a hard, dull bitterness of cold-- "A chill no coat however stout, Of homespun stuff can quite shut out."