occasional murder mystery, always more than a nine days' wonder; the public had not yet grown callous. One of the stories records an assault with murderous intent. There were more fires. Our author has a fire story. Suicide has always been with us and we have here a rather notably well handled one—minus the horror, which the fastidious artist must generally, one would think, doubt his capacity to dwell on to advantage, just as the sensitive painter leaves Niagaras and volcanic convulsions to Nature. But incontestably the life here mirrored was quieter than ours and, being "slower," was correspondingly fuller. People had time to devote to living.

It is furthermore incidentally to be pointed out that the Vignettes have a technical interest quite apart from that of their substance. Every one nowadays is enormously interested in process. One might almost say there was a "popular movement" of concern with the philosophy of technic. If so, it could hardly be denied that Mr. Matthews was one of its pioneers. Certainly of the philosophy of the short story he was the first analytic and explicit exponent. Each of these tales is his theory in action, so to say. Nor is it to be doubted, in the case of so ardently systematic a temperament and such a talent for argument and organization, that this was in each case definitely his design. He was not content to contend but desired to demonstrate and we have here his "philosophy teaching by example." Accordingly the skeleton, the structure, the framework and the filling of each little tale produce an effect that at least is bound to have the merit of having been intended. The hap-hazard and the desultory are avoided not only altogether, but, to analysis, quite obviously. For this reason indeed the Vignettes have also, I should think, a certain text-book or "collateral reading" value in the populous courses now offered by the Universities for the elevation of the short-story-writing masses. Nothing, one would say, could better inculcate by explicit example the measured and disciplined practice, the ship-shape and organic result which—plus, of course, literary talent—are the elementary excellences of this prevalent form of literary expression.

"Introductions," too, I may add, are in fashion, and fashion is, as is well known, inexorable. Otherwise I should not have been asked to write one about the lighter work of an author who in virtue of a shelf-full of books comprehending all varieties of literary activity—novels and tales, biography, autobiography, history, linguistics, literary and social criticism, the drama, versification and verse as well as prose, even juvenile fiction—is widely recognized both at home and abroad as one of the particularly representative men of letters of our time.

W. C. BROWNELL.