It is in the nature of things that this kind of autobiographic fiction, howsoever strong may be the incidents, is not nearly so absorbing as is the other kind I am going to instance, the psychological, to which “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” belong; for in literature, as in life, the more interest we feel in the character, the more interest we feel in what befalls the character. Unlike the kind of autobiographic fiction typified by “Rob Roy,” in which, as I have said, the main issue is little influenced and not at all controlled by the narrator but by other characters, or, if not by other characters, by the wheels of circumstance;—in the psychological kind of autobiographic fiction, the personality of the narrator controls, or largely controls, the main issue of the dramatic action. In other words, the incidents in the latter kind of autobiographic fiction are selected and marshalled for the purpose of declaring the character of the narrator. The most superb exemplars of this kind of autobiographic narrative are stories which in all other respects are extremely unlike Borrow’s—“Caleb Williams,” “Manon Lescaut,” “Jane Eyre,” and “Villette.” A year or two ago I recurred to this subject in some comments I made upon some judgments of a well-known and admirable critic. I will take the liberty of referring here to one or two of the remarks I then made, for they seem to bear very directly upon Borrow’s method as compared with Defoe’s. The same artistic instinct which we see in Defoe and in Borrow’s quasi autobiographic work is exhibited by the Abbé Prévost in “Manon Lescaut.” The real object of the last-mentioned story (which, it will be remembered, is an episode in a much longer story) was to paint vivid pictures of the careless life of Paris at the period of the story, and especially to paint in vivid colours a kind of character which is essentially peculiar to Paris, the light-hearted, good-natured, unheeding _grisette_. But by making it appear that the incidents in Chevalier des Grieux’s life are selected by him in order to show the effect of the life-lesson upon himself, Prévost gives to every incident the piquancy which properly belongs to this, the psychological form of autobiographic fiction. It must, however, be admitted that at its best the autobiographic form of fiction is rarely, very rarely, broad enough to be a satisfactory form of art, even when, as in “The Woman in White,” the story consists of a series of autobiographic narratives stitched together. It was this difficulty which confronted Dickens when he wrote “Bleak House.” When he was writing “David Copperfield” he had felt the sweetness and fascination of writing in the autobiographic form, and had seen the sweetness and fascination of reading it; but he also felt how constricted the form is in regard to breadth, and it occurred to him that he could combine the two forms—that he could give in the same book the