To
compensate those who disapprove of my choice, I have included two
unpublished letters. The examples of Wilde's epistolary style, published
since his death, have been generally associated with disagreeable
subjects. Those included here will, I hope, prove a pleasant contrast.

ROBERT ROSS

HOW THEY STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY

There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make
it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so inartistic as not to contain a
single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll
reads dangerously like an experiment out of the _Lancet_. As for Mr.
Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly
magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that
when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a
personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of
cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr.
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon
mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style,
his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it
is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his
voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn
is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts
down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As
one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost
unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soar
towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent
chromolithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants take
refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-
tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion
Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is
like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel
d'Italie." Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral
platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and
that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. _Robert
Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genre
ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems
thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that
it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in
the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it.
Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England
is the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing school
of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only
thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave
it raw.--_The Decay of Lying_.

THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH

Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by
flashes of lightning.