essential to success. Want and disease are mighty factors in life; but they have never yet inspired a work of art. The late Professor Boyesen has indeed recorded his unqualified delight at the skill with which Russian novelists describe the most unpleasant maladies. He said enthusiastically that, after reading one of these masterpieces, he felt himself developing some of the very symptoms which had been so accurately portrayed; but to many readers this would be scant recommendation. It is not symptoms we seek in stories. The dullest of us have imagination enough to invent them for ourselves.
"Poverty," said old Robert Burton, "is a most odious calling," and it has not grown any more enjoyable in the past three hundred years. Nothing is less worth while than to idealize its discomforts, unless it be to sourly exaggerate them. There is no life so hard as to be without compensations, especially for those who take short views; and the view of poverty seldom goes beyond the needs of the hour and their fulfilment. But there has arisen of late years a school of writers—for the most part Eng-
