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nagging critic, who is invisibly present whenever one writes, and who hereupon suggests that Holmes was provincial. Mr. Morse replies that no creative writer, except Shakespeare, who has been cosmopolitan has also made himself a 'place in the hearts of mankind.' I should myself reply by denying that Shakespeare was an exception. Nobody, surely, ever reflected more fully and faithfully the great imaginative movement of his own time; and, if we knew the people of Stratford-on-Avon and the frequenters of the Globe Theatre as we know the people of Scott's Edinburgh, I suspect that we should recognise the Shallows and the Falstaffs of the plays as clearly as we recognise Scott's friends in the Waverley Novels. Or to drop Shakespeare, who is apt, I sometimes fancy, to intrude a little too often, was there ever any one who was at once more full of personal and local idiosyncrasies, and, at the same time, more thoroughly 'cosmopolitan,' than Montaigne?—one of the numerous list of authors to whom, as Mr. Morse reminds us, Holmes has been compared. A man surely need not cease to be cosmopolitan because he is provincial, any more than he ceases to be an athlete because he plays the game of his country—cricket in England and