first one and then another amanuensis" upset her equanimity. Then
there is the tragic story of Mr. R.L. HITCHENS, who, being engaged
to write an article against time, sent out for a stenographer, who on
arrival proved to be a man with a large black beard of so sinister
an aspect that Mr. HICHINS was forced to dismiss him and write the
article in his own hand. Yet Mr. HICHENSis not easily put off, for we
learn that he finds he works best in big hotels and not, as we might
have guessed, in the sequestered tranquillity of a minaret.

To some writers solitude is the true school of genius. Yet Sir
LEWIS MORRIS found some of his happiest thoughts come to him while
travelling in the underground, while Mr. W.B. YEATS records a similar
experience as the result of a journey on the top of a tram-car. Your
advanced modernists, with MARINETTI at their head, find their best
stimulus to creative effort in the clang and clatter of machinery.
_per contra_, to return to _The Daily Graphic_, Mrs. C.N. WILLIAMSON
must have pretty things to look at "in business hours." But the
happiest of all our authors is Madame ALBANESI, who "finds her
brain-spur in a blank sheet of paper, and not the ghost of an idea
what she is going to write about." Less fortunate writers labour
assiduously only to leave the minds of their readers a blank, without
the ghost of an idea of what the author has been writing about.

It is a pity that Mr. W.L. GEORGE, in his interesting survey of modern
writers of fiction in the _English Review_, has told us nothing
about the methods of the "Neo-Victorians" and "Semi-Victorians,"
the "Edwardians" and "belated Edwardians," and the "Georgians" and
"Neo-Georgians." With all these classes he deals faithfully. But his
criticism is purely literary. He fails to tell us the things that
every reader wants to know. It is all very well to say that the