mutandis; personally he is a more stirring and engaging companion,
but so far as kinship to probabilities or even possibilities is
concerned, perhaps the older version of him is the more
presentable. But in this age of marvels we seem less difficult to
suit in this respect than our forefathers were.

The fact is, meanwhile, that, in the riddle story, the detective
was an afterthought, or, more accurately, a deus ex machina to make
the story go. The riddle had to be unriddled; and who could do it
so naturally and readily as a detective? The detective, as Poe saw
him, was a means to this end; and it was only afterwards that
writers perceived his availability as a character. Lecoq
accordingly becomes a figure in fiction, and Sherlock, while he was
as yet a novelty, was nearly as attractive as the complications in
which he involved himself. Riddle-story writers in general,
however, encounter the obvious embarrassment that their detective
is obliged to lavish so much attention on the professional services
which the exigencies of the tale demand of him, that he has very
little leisure to expound his own personal equation--the rather
since the attitude of peering into a millstone is not, of itself,
conducive to elucidations of oneself; the professional endowment
obscures all the others. We ordinarily find, therefore, our author
dismissing the individuality of his detective with a few strong
black-chalk outlines, and devoting his main labor upon what he
feels the reader will chiefly occupy his own ingenuity with,--
namely, the elaboration of the riddle itself. Reader and writer
sit down to a game, as it were, with the odds, of course,
altogether on the latter's side,--apart from the fact that a writer
sometimes permits himself a little cheating. It more often happens
that the detective appears to be in the writer's pay, and aids the