sgssti ENGLISH PORTRAITS A SERIES OF LITHOGRAPHED DRAWING! WILL ROTHENSTEIN ENGLISH PORTRAITS This Edition is limited to 750 Copies THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE LIBRARY MY MOTHER I OFFER WHAT IS BEST IN THESE DRAWINGS The twenty-four drawings included in the present volume were made during the years 1897-8. I wish to record my thanks due to Messrs. Grant Allen , William Archer , L. F. Austin , Max Beerbohtn , Laurence Binyon , Vernon Blackburn , Edward Cloddy The Rev. Canon Dixon , Edmund Gosse , C. Z. Graves , John Gray , Laurence Housman , Lionel Johnson , Prof. York Powell and Clement Shorter for the biographical notices which accompany the portraits. WILL ROTHENSTEIN Chelsea, April 1898 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart. 2. Mr. Thomas Hardy 3. Sir F. Seymour Haden, F.R.C.S. 4. Mr. William Archer 5. The Rt. Rev. Dr. Creighton, Bishop of London 6. The Marchioness of Granby 7. Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, P.C., M.P. 8. Mr. John Sargent, R.A. 9. Mr. A. W. Pinero 10. Mr. W. E. Henley 11. Miss Ellen Terry 12. Mr. Sidney Colvin 13. Prof. A. Legros 14. Mr. Robert Bridges 15. Prof. Charles Villiers Stanford 16. Mr. George Bernard Shaw 17. Mrs. Meynell 18. Mr. C. Ricketts and Mr. C. H. Shannon 19. Mr. Grant Allen 20. Mr. Walter Crane 21. Sir Henry Irving 22. Mr. George Gissing 23. Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham 24. Mr. Henry James SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK BART. The Pollocks furnish Mr. Francis Galton with one of his best examples of “Hereditary Genius.” Born some two-and-fifty years ago, the son of the Queen’s Remembrancer came early to the front as a man learned in the law, and with a keen eye for its humorous side, evidenced in the versified “Leading Cases done into English.” Sir Frederick has filled one chair after another in Oxford and London; he has illuminated the Principles of Contracts and the Law of Torts; he has prepared for legal dyspeptics a Digest of the Law of Partnership; while his excursions into philosophy have yielded a brilliant “ Life of Spinoza.” He has a rich musical voice, and is as shy as he is learned. MR. THOMAS HARDY Mr. Thomas Hardy is a Dorsetshire man pushed to the point of genius. Born near Dorchester in 1840, he has taught his native county to realise itself in literature. Body, soul, and spirit, Mr. Hardy is a typical, thorough, glorified West Countryman. He has chosen the name of Wessex for the trade-mark of his novels; but it is really the popular and Celtic element of the West Country that he has enshrined in his life and work, not the aristocratic West Saxon or Norman factor. He knows the people, and he makes them live for us. He has the delicacy of touch that is innate with his folk; he has also the idyllic instinct, the pessimistic and almost fatalistic vein (which he shares with Jefferies), and the power of rising superior to all things base or low, even when he deigns to handle them. Retiring and almost timid in personal demeanour, he has yet the courage of his convictions, his art, and his processes. As lovable as he is modest, and as genial as he is great, he has endeared himself long since to all who know him, and to thousands who have never seen his face. 5 . ! uAxN fjf M "M m. * & tway TKP? :'r; r? c t: SIR F. SEYMOUR HADEN, F.R.C.S. PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PAINTER ETCHERS. One of the foremost of those who revived the art of Etching in France and in England, the founder and first President of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers, a distinguished physician, himself the son of a physician, an expert on the etchings of Rembrandt and a great collector, an indefatigable controversialist, he enjoys as wide a reputation abroad as at home. He has had the privilege of seeing proofs of his plates fought over in the sale-room, a complete set of his etchings being as difficult of achievement as a set of Rembrandt’s. One of the most hospitable of men, he has been alike the friend and patron of many artists whose names are now written large on the roll of fame. He owns one of the most beautiful country houses in England, and was greatly admired by Edmond de Goncourt. ' /. .' - ■XX Ui',1 A * H*~*r h#y T.WAY. IMP T LOUDON. MR. WILLIAM ARCHER Mr. William Archer is the doyen of the modern section of the Dramatic Critics of London. A few months younger than Mr. Walkley and Mr. Bernard Shaw, he was in the field long before them; the articles in the London Figaro , with which he first made his mark, appeared in 1879. Thus, Mr. Archer has roots in the past. Familiar from his boyhood with the Norwegian language (he is a nephew of Colin Archer, the builder of the Fram) he early gained from Ibsen a conception of the drama in relation to the depths of modern life far in advance of his Press contemporaries. He seized on the first signs of serious aim in the works of Mr. Pinero and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones; made the most of them with all his power, and convinced them that the world was responding to their efforts to get the drama out of its old shallow grooves. He soon had plenty of recruits, and very clever ones too, on the Press; but none of them were sufficiently constant to a permanent standard of dramatic quality to make their work worth republishing, as Mr. Archer’s is, in annual volumes, which are unique as works of reference and critical records. Mr. Archer alone is steady in his love of the theatre and his reference in every judgment of his to permanent ideals of excellence. Thus he maintains his position. ' THE RIGHT REV. DR. CREIGHTON, BISHOP OF LONDON. A scholar, an administrator, gifted with a certain sympathetic power, and endowed with a statesmanlike judgment and discernment, the Bishop of London has just the qualities that befit a prelate of the Renascence and of to-day. He knows when to speak and when to be silent. He can write clearly and eloquently. He has praised Queen Elizabeth, and described the great Catholic church of the fifteenth century with a keen and wise intelligence. He is already a power in the Church of England, and well fitted to stand, as he stood once in Russia, as her chosen and worthy representative. He is prepared to face great issues, and to face them with calm and prudence—without a trace of that “clerical temper” that is, as he knows, of all things most distasteful and ludicrous to Englishmen. The drawing was made during the sitting of the Episcopal Court, Dr. Tristram, the Bishop’s Chancellor, being represented in the fore¬ ground. WAY IMP* I.OHD0N THE MARCHIONESS OF GRANBY. In no lady of our day are more felicitously blent the attributes of an aristocrat and an artist; whether as the wife of a Premier’s private secretary, a future Duchess, a guest and hostess in the world of la haute politique, or as a patroness and practitioner of the arts, Lady Granby has borne herself with grace and discretion. Had she lived in the earlier Victorian epoch, she had assuredly been a prime ornamentress of the Albums, and been portrayed by D’Orsay. As it is, she has been portrayed by many fashionable painters and photographers, and immortalised on two canvases by Mr. Watts. She has devoted herself to the task of drawing, in silver-point, the most notable of her contemporaries; a task in which she has unique opportunity, seeing that to a lady of her position Rank is ever ready, and Intellect eager, to sit. With her delicate, deft pencil, she has made a great number of portraits, which are likely to be as interesting in a future generation as they are pleasurable in this. THE RIGHT HON. W. E. H. LECKY, M.P., P.C. Mr. William Edward Hartpole Lecky was born near Dublin in the year 1838. He is a distinguished member of, and a distinguished Member for, the great Irish University, best known as T. C. D. The most eminent of contemporary philosophic historians, he has written many volumes in a style always of sober dignity, often of grave eloquence. He is an Irish Unionist of an exceptionally generous kind, and Nationalist Irishmen are proud of him. In an House of Commons which contains Mr. Morley, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Bryce, he has made his mark as a lucid literary speaker, with strong convictions, far above party prejudice. If he has published a volume of verse, that is an amiable indiscretion, which may more grievously be laid to the charge of many another public man ; but, had he an enemy, that enemy could find no charge more serious to bring against this profoundly accomplished and courteous gentleman. JOHN SARGENT, R.A. The most thorough among the artists who have come out of the Paris Studios. That same brilliancy of execution and determined honesty (qualities not often to be found in company with one another) which gained for Mr. Sargent his succ&s cTexecration a dozen years ago, has now secured him his proper position at the head of our younger portrait-painters. Still the most modest of men, as indeed he was even in the days of a furious opposition, his sterling qualities are only really known to the very few who can claim his intimacy; for the rest, a charming host and a sympathetic companion. He is an eclectic admirer of the old masters, whom he knows well, and with a passion for the sculpturesque, he has an instinctive dislike for what he conceives to be over precious and self-conscious in art. His recent election to the full honours of the Royal Academy was received with universal approbation, and he will probably do more than any one to bring about the rapprochement of what are considered to be the two opposite schools of modern painting. He adores music and musicians, and, unlike the careful housewife, likes to sleep on his opinions before he airs them. I * ■ . • , Ml i f. > . MR. ARTHUR WING PINERO. The rashest thing a man can do is to falsify a comfortable commonplace. The critics who, up to 1893, were happy in the belief that there was not, and could not be, such a thing as an English drama, felt their holiest convictions outraged when Mr. Pinero wrote The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. They have not forgiven him, and they never will; especially as his subsequent productions, down to, and including, The Princess and the Butterfly , have shown an equal disregard for their favourite dogma. In four years of undaunted labour and uninterrupted progress, Mr. Pinero has proved himself an observer, a satirist, a strong and serious dramatic artist. It may be hoped, however, that he will not wholly keep his fantasy in abeyance, but will return now and then to the whimsical humour of The Magistrate , Dandy Dick , and The Hobby-Horse. Before he became a dramatist he was an actor of some distinction, and acquired on the stage itself that mastery of its tactics which is manifest in all his productions. He is still on the right side of forty-five, and has, in all probability, the best part of his career before him. i ■ ; . fa «» » i . T.V/AY n^,r T ' J2D0H MR. WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY. In literary conflict he has worn out more than one red waistcoat, and in politics he is a staunch reactionaiy, with a great contempt for the Victorian Era. He is so fine an exponent of philosophic Toryism, and has so fast a grip of its principles, that he would have been a fearful thorn in the Tory side had he gone into the House of Commons. Happily, he chose to adorn Literature, and is known to us as the writer of many beautiful verses and as the most trenchant of all our critics. His style—so wholly his own, with its curt and burnished phrases—is a trap in which several young men have come to most untimely ends; whilst others, still with us, owe much of their success to his influence and his encouragement. He is a famous talker, who will listen with the utmost courtesy to any one who dares interrupt him, and the old tag, ex forti dulcedo, seems quite appropriate to “ Burly/’ for he is as much loved by all who know him as he is feared by all whom he knows. He has written plays (much admired by every actor-manager) with Robert Louis Stevenson, has edited Burns and The Scots Observer , has ever been of a habit most disputative and polemic, and is supposed to admire the writings of Mr. Andrew Lang. Indeed, it is one of the most startling facts in modern ethnography that Mr. Henley is not a Scotchman. V \< i4 4 ! i Li ■ii h 11 r> . I M V, ’ ?h « / MISS ELLEN TERRY. Miss Terry, as vve all know, went on the stage in her childhood, and not only “picked up” her profession, but was systematically taught it by Mrs. Charles Kean, with the result that to this day her business is always thoroughly well done, and her part gets over the footlights to the ends of the largest theatre without the loss of a syllable or the waste of a stroke. When Mrs. Kean had thus qualified her to be the heroine of a play, Nature, not to be outdone, qualified her to be the heroine of a picture by making her grow up quite unlike anybody that had ever been seen on earth before. Let us hope that Nature has not broken the mould: if she has, Miss Terry’s portraits will go down to posterity as those of the only real New Woman, who was never repeated afterwards. The great painters promptly pounced upon her; and she soon added what she learnt in the studio to what she had already learnt on the stage so successfully that when she was first seen in “Hamlet” it was exactly as if the powers of a beautiful picture of Ophelia had been ex¬ tended to speaking and singing. Finally, she qualified herself to be a heroine of the pen. How she did so is not known; but many collections of her letters exist ; and all who have seen them admit her extraordinary powers of vivid self-expression through the written word. The letters are telephonic: they speak to the reader. Altogether, too extraordinary a woman to be quite sanely judged by her contemporaries. [Hr J fa i .■ it Hi ' I ’Wl * It l Si 1 m 1 / MR. SIDNEY COLVIN. To the English public, Mr. Sidney Colvin is most immediately known as the friend of Stevenson. There are other writers, yet living, who greatly prize his friendship; and could Keats return to the world which used him ill, he surely would claim, among a thousand new and loyal champions, a special friend in the author of that admirable Life, in the editor of those charming Letters. How choice an epigram, too, would Landor have inscribed, could he have foreknown it, in the Golden Treasury of his own work, already a little classic, which he owes to Mr. Colvin, and which has brought him most of his readers of to-day. To Europe, as to students at the Print Room, Mr. Colvin is known as one of the most accomplished, liberal, and learned of those who have made the history of art their study. His latest work is a book on the early Florentine engraver, Maso Finiguerra. He is an adept in several modern tongues, and at home with all the classics. II n *1 t . * t !■ v . • L* 1 1 IK, I PROF. ALPHONSE LEGROS. It is probable that, in any other period except our own, the multifarious talents of Alphonse Legros would have been largely made use of for the decoration of public buildings, both with paintings and sculpture, and the portraying of its public men. No one, perhaps, has been more richly gifted, and if he has made full use of his various talents, it has been through his own love of art, rather than by the continued help of patrons, or of his country. Amongst the most brilliant of a distinguished circle, he was nevertheless unable to subsist on the result of his production in France, and, to the praise of England be it said, that a kindly welcome, with sufficient work to enable him at least to carry on his work, and later an Art Professorship, were given him in this country. An exhibition of all that this great man has done, in painting, sculpture, etching and the art of making medals, would probably drive home to us how astonishing an artist we have now living in our midst. In an age when experiment calls forth greater admiration than achievement, M. Legros can scarcely expect all that is his due. At least he has the satisfaction of knowing, as in his younger days, his genius was recognised by Daumier and J. F. Millet in France, and by Rossetti and Watts in England, so in the later years of his life he is looked upon by such artists as Rodin and Degas, and many of the younger men all over Europe, as one of the few who still carry on the great traditions of the past. He is an enchanting causeur , and an untiring lover of beautiful things. i i I V H - jVv . jf rv T r f . 18 i i II I MR. ROBERT BRIDGES. Among “ them that know” there is continual wonder that wider recognition is not given to the genius of Robert Bridges. His generation hesitates to place him where in heart it feels that he ought to be placed ; but the reason for not doing a thing should scarcely be that it ought to be done. The living generation ought to give the signal to posterity. One or two fair opportunities have been lamentably lost. The mass of work already laid silently before the world by this writer is very considerable : in quality it raises the literary character of the age ; withal it is wonderfully various. Only one man in the language has shown a greater mastery of the methods of the dramatic art, and a stronger spring of sentiment. One of his dramas con¬ tains the most ludicrous situation ever invented, another the most pathetic. His sonnets are a collection that will stand among the first three or four, unless his generation befool posterity by its reticence. His Shorter Poems are as new an application to nature as photography. To poetry as an art he has rendered special service. The influence of his “ new prosody ” is apparent every¬ where. We know of Milton and of Keats what we should not have known without him. It is perhaps a pity that the masters so seldom write on one another. If Milton had written on Shakespeare, we should know things that we shall never know. Mr. Bridges lives apart from the litterateurs and critics, and evidently enjoys the exclusion from favour. But it is absurd to speak of him, as the newspapers do, as a hermit or recluse. Delicate grandeur of writing is based upon grace of life. It is equally absurd in them to excuse themselves for ignoring his dramas by giving out that “ the valuable part ” of his work is to be found in his lyrics. PROFESSOR CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD. Inheriting his musical talent from his father, an Examiner to the Court of Chancery in Ireland, whose splendid voice and histrionic gifts would have made his fortune on the operatic stage, Professor Stanford is a happy instance of precocious promise amply redeemed by the achievements of maturity. A sound classical scholar—he graduated with honours at Cambridge—with a good deal more than a bowing acquaintance with three modern languages, a fine organist, a singularly illuminative pianist, an admirable conductor and a vivacious and witty writer, Professor Stanford, in regard to mere versatility, is the Saint-Saens of the British musical world. On the creative side he has essayed every form of musical composition, and, though barely on the threshold of middle age, has won conspicuous success in walks so arduous and divergent as quartet and symphony, opera and oratorio. In proof of the catholicity of his taste, it may be enough to allude to his friendship with Bo'ito and Brahms, with Bruneau and Joachim. A charming companion, a genuine humorist, and a man of wide literary sympathies, Professor Stanford has made his home for close on a quarter of a century in England, without ever ceasing to be an Irishman in the fullest and best sense of the word. MR. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. Dramatic-musical-literary-art-critic, orator-lecturer- pamphleteer, Fabia.n-SatMrday-Revie'w, vegetarian- Hibernian, cyclist-anti-tobacconist, abstainer-aesthete, atheist-churchgoer and vestryman-dramatist, Mr. Shaw is a jewel of many facets. He is, indeed, rather too complex to be taken seriously by the Public, (for which, being a good Socialist, he has a profound contempt), and he is likely to remain, as he has ever been, a mystery-man with a big drum, and an egoist who might himself be puzzled to say exactly where his sterling affectations end and his frivolous con¬ victions begin. It is in dramatic criticism that he has loomed largest hitherto. There is no manager in London but frowns at the mere whisper of those notorious initials, G. B. S. Yet, for all his pugnacity and intransigeance , Mr. Shaw’s brogue keeps him from being disliked in private, and his keen humour from being a bore in public. He contradicts and jibes at no one more often than himself, and, if his judgments are often scatter-brained, he has, at any rate, brains to scatter. 8 ■ * i • l' if N m t v 6 * i ii i m MRS. MEYNELL. Alice Meynell may be said to have had the curious experience of making a double reputation in her life¬ time. Her first volume of poetry appeared when she was a girl, and lovers of literature, among whom Dante Rossetti is to be numbered, knew its value during the years in which the poet herself acknow¬ ledged her Muse with the dignity of silence. When next she stepped from that reserve it was no longer to sing in formal measures, but to speak an exquisite prose ; and the fine appreciation which followed the publication of her “ Rhythm of Life ” was both a renewal and an experience. It is difficult to dis¬ tinguish or to compare with adequacy her twofold expressiveness, for—rare thing in a poet!—neither is her prose written because she has uttered poetry, nor has her poetry been uttered because her achieve¬ ment in prose is itself complete. The prose comes a little more towards the outer noise of daily life than the poetry; but it guards itself with a perfect reticence, with sensitiveness, with the most delicate beauty of form, and no less with humour. Its thoughtfulness is always with that which is new in the old; and therefore they that know Mrs. Meynell’s work intimately find in everything she has written the right justification of her anthology, “ The Flower of the Mind.” Her own literature is its passport. . MR. CHARLES RICKETTS AND MR. CHARLES HAZELWOOD SHANNON. Mr. Charles Ricketts and Mr. Charles Hazelwood Shannon are properly depicted together here, in deference to the popular association of their names. Certain pairs of names run conveniently into a phrase; and so it has happened in the case of these two artists, whose widely sundered talents are only kin in being founded on the fundamental aim in art: pictorial expression within the intellectual restrictions which make representation become art. The dis¬ similarity of their work excites more wonder than any chance resemblance, when it is known that they have lived and grown and worked together in the same house from boyhood up. To make a sharp verbal distinction, Mr. Ricketts is eminently a designer. His art has, through years of unremitting activity and unappeasable curiosity, voluntarily nar¬ rowed itself to the area within which he reigns absolutely: the structure and decoration of books. The “harmony” which characterises the Vale books is due to an unique method, the artist being respon¬ sible for the make of the book from first to last. To Mr. Ricketts belongs the credit of reviving original wood-engraving. Following a principle of growth quite opposite, Mr. Shannon has ever enlarged the field of his performance, broadened his individual aims and the methods directed to the realisation of them. His known dexterity as a draughtsman has come about through patient experiment in pastel, lithography, etching; and the history of art in our time is written to no small extent in certain of his attainments in widely various mediums. -r~ ' ’ ■* ' MR. GRANT ALLEN. In his life of fifty years—he was born at Kingston on the St. Lawrence in 1848—Mr. Grant Allen has attempted so many things and has done so large a portion of them well, that the English public, jealous always of versatility, has come to treat him as a fit object of critical suspicion. “ He is no true man of science,” says one, and yet his first book, “ Physio¬ logical Aesthetics,” Darwin chose to “crown” with his very practical approval; “he is no writer of fiction,” says another, and one has but to read again his “The Curate of Churnside” and his “The Rev. John Creedy,” short stories too often overlooked when the English conte is considered. The catalogue of his purely scientific works covers a wide ground, and ends for the time with “The Evolution of the Idea of God,” published yesterday ; his fiction—is it not written in every publisher’s catalogue ? And there are other books—political excursions, gleanings on the “ lower slopes” of Parnassus, even the guide¬ book he has not despised. Withal he is an Oxford man—Merton was his college; he has held a Govern¬ ment post in Jamaica, and he is supposed to claim to have “ discovered ” William Watson, Antibes, and the true theory of Force and Energy. He lives at Hind Head and rides a bicycle. 11 i T.v .'ay rAP~ : ■ ' u n r>: fWr* ^ /Y«v •- ••• • . 5 f b ' ■ I MR. WALTER CRANE. It is a test of imagination that, even in this over¬ trodden world, it can always discover a new field for its exercise. Just as “Lewis Carroll” discovered in childhood a new fairy-world on which to lavish the charm of a high literary skill and the wisdom of an adept and subtle humour, so did Mr. Walter Crane in the early days of his career find there the very ground for his artistic ability to display itself with the utmost naturalness and effect. To say that books for children had never received artistic treat¬ ment before would be to say too much, but Mr. Walter Crane brought to them qualities so new and original as to make the whole field of toy-books a new creation under his hands. His colouring con¬ tained a spirit which only Blake had at all touched —something elemental and floral, a sense of nature as childhood sees and remembers it; colour in its infancy would perhaps describe the charm. To a dainty seriousness of drawing he added such play¬ fulness of humour that no child is offended at being led by him in ways of artistic virtue. No man has a larger army of imitators; to-day, perhaps, resting upon his laurels, he also is apt to imitate himself; but still he does so more charmingly than any of those from whom he has caught the habit. His industry is so great, and his output so multitu¬ dinous, that one doubts whether the Sabbath-day has ever fulfilled its mission in his life. The pattern of his politics is somewhat aggressive; yet he is a man whose enemies are in a hopeless minority. SIR HENRY IRVING. The English stage has boasted many famous actors. None has impressed his personality on the varied associations of his time so strongly as Sir Henry Irving. He does not simply direct a theatre, though to do that for twenty years with success is no small exploit. He is not simply the acknowledged head of the dramatic profession everywhere, by virtue of un¬ questioned genius, though that position counts for a good deal. He is a public monument, an artistic adjunct to the British Constitution. The Lyceum is not as other theatres: it is a pillar of the State and a branch of Convocation. To see Irving is, for the younger members of every rightly conducted family, a religious initiation in the arts. He has made play¬ going a civic rite rather than a frivolous pastime. The public eye loves to dwell upon his figure at great ceremonials, for he contributes that element of picturesque and natural dignity in which our rulers and law-givers are not rich. The spell of his art owes much to the force of his character; and as a representative Englishman he inspires a sentiment which may be justly described as affectionate pride. MR. GEORGE GISSING. Mr. George Gissing was born at Wakefield on November 22, 1857. His early years were spent in the atmosphere of schools, although his life as a schoolmaster is perhaps less reflected in his many powerful novels than in the very able volume on Charles Dickens which he has published during the present year. His love of scholarship, however, is profound, and in personal intercourse one sees less of the grim realist than of the scholar who delights to talk of Sappho and ^Eschylus, of Horace and Lucretius. Some of his first stories were published serially in the Cornhill Magazine , but he first came prominently before the public as a powerful writer of realistic fiction by his novel “New Grub Street,” which appeared in 1891. Since then each successive year has produced a strong book from his pen, “Born in Exile,” “Denzil Quarrier,” “The Odd Women,” “In the Year of Jubilee,” being some of the best known. In all these books, as in his short stories, Mr. Gissing has touched with extraordinary vigour and insight the life of the lower middle-class in this country, the class which Dickens idealised so delight¬ fully, but which Mr. Gissing makes one see in an atmosphere of sordid struggle, of vulgar enthusiasm over trifles, of hideous furniture and decoration. In his presentation of some of these things Mr. Gissing is scarcely less effective than Balzac himself. * ' • MR. R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM Mr. Cunninghame Graham, an engaging blend of dandy, dreamer, and buccaneer, is a gentleman of various foibles and accomplishments. Too volatile for any one continent, he has travelled far in every direction, and has written books that are mines of wit and humour and bewildering information. He has dallied with Paraguay, and quite recently the Moors made him their prisoner. Nor is this the sole captivity he has endured. Some years ago he con¬ tracted an unfortunate habit of thinking aloud in Trafalgar Square, and the authorities sought to break him of this habit by means of imprisonment with hard labour. The culprit, always a lover of adventure for its own sake, did his time gaily, and when he came out every one—except the compositors of the Press, to whom his handwriting is a source of grave annoyance—felt very much relieved and delighted. He is proud of his long and illustrious lineage, and in the “Guide to Monteith ” has proved, more or less conclusively, that he is the rightful King of England. Yet he takes the Hanoverians in good part. Indeed, his humour is such that he takes all things in good part, and, though he prefers the society of blokes, Bohemians, and black men, he has never denied that the beau monde has its charm. MR. HENRY JAMES Among those who will be free, and masters of themselves, even though their independence be offensive to the sovereign crowd, Mr. Henry James is pre-eminent. He determined, early in life—but not too early, at the close of an adolescence devoted to impassioned observation—to become an artist. He chose for his province in art the criticism of the soul mainly presented in the form of prose fiction. In carrying out, through seven and twenty years, this project, he has swerved neither to the right nor to the left from the pursuit of an impossible per¬ fection. He is never satisfied, never weary in well-doing; “ now a flash of red, now a flash of blue,” the divine vision of a style that shall be the body and soul of life in literature hangs above him, a pendulous and evasive mirage. Hence arise the peculiarities which encourage the slipshod to be hostile, and which sometimes confound the very lovers of his work. Supererogations mar the ease of the performance; the bricks are piled so airily that a straw brings them rattling down. These are the penalties of that intrepid endeavour to leave nothing unexplored, nothing incompletely indicated. These are the dust-stains on the brilliant, muscular hand that will not, cannot, drop the tool at sundown. Yet Mr. Henry James is no loser by this feverish solicitude. He has grown to be one of the greatest men we have in letters. If you ask us where, with respect to others, do we place him?—“Oh, you know, we don’t put them back to back that way; it’s the infancy of art! And he gives us a pleasure so rare! ” , - v.'At* IM£ ~ i/: r: .v-'t: