tively, of experiences of art life in Rome, and of yachting experiences in the Irish Sea. It was not until "Silence Farm" (1899), as I have said, that, as William Sharp, he found himself.
"The Gypsy Christ" (1896), which might well have been developed into a full-fledged romance, is less original than any of his longer writings. It is, like "The Weird of Michael Scott" and "A Northern Night," closely allied to essays of his other rôle, that of "F.M.," to catch and express "the tempestuous loveliness of terror," such as the catastrophe of "The Mountain Lovers," "The Barbaric Tales," and those short stories in which Gloom Achanna is hero-villain. It is in such work that Sharp shows his affinities to Poe, affinities which are not elsewhere as obvious as his affinities to De Quincey. Narrative was not native to De Quincey any more than it was to Sharp, though Sharp was led toward it by his interest in character, an interest that was not in any large measure given to De Quincey, who, when he turned to narrative other than that which relates what had happened to him or what he had dreamed had happened to him, makes the reader feel he did so as a concession to the public. Another interest that was Sharp's, an interest amounting to a passion,—out-of-doors,—De Quincey had not at all, for all his devotion to Wordsworth and to Wordsworth's interests. Like De Quincey, on the other hand, Sharp delights in "fine writing," in both senses of the phrase, in the "highfalutin" that is objectionable, and in the ornately beautiful that is one fitting expression of romantic thought. Both men preferred the mouth-
