A few years ago Mr. H. G. Wells promised to be in the very first flight of popular writers. His scientific ingenuity was quite startling, and his series of books about the marvels of the future led up to The War of the Worlds, which was so excellently done that the account of the descent of the Martians on this planet had the air of absolute truth, which is

one's want of real belief in them. The human animal begins to find life quite complicated enough, and is already contemplating a return to Nature just by way of a rest. We reproduce herewith a recent portrait of Mr. Wells.

In England the pension scheme of the Incorporated Society of Authors is attracting considerable attention. The Society is to raise a certain amount of money to supplement the operations of the Royal Literary Fund, which grants only donations, and the Civil List pensions, which amount to only four hundred pounds a year. The fund of the new society will be used for the foundation of pensions of not less than thirty pounds or more than a hundred pounds a year, and candidates must have attained the age of sixty years. The following subscriptions to the fund have been already promised:

Mr. George Meredith (President of the
Society), .

£100

H. G. WELLS.

the first essential of success for stories of the kind. Mr. Wells is something more than a combination of Jules Verne and Edward Bellamy, and those who have read Conversations with an Uncle now Extinct will agree that he has a pretty wit that is rusting, while he dives. into the future of mechanical invention.

But he has been the victim of very bad health, and has in consequence rather dropped out of public sight. Even the

best of his marvel tales were but nine days' wonders, demanding an immense amount of attention for the moment and then forgotten. When the Sleeper Wakes, Mr. Wells's latest, is a good story in itself, apart from its speculations on the development of material progress. However, these latter are rather spoiled by

and only 43,000 in Great Britain.

Then look at the list of Uncle Sam's offspring with high places in the British book market. These names jump to lips: Atherton, Chambers, Barr, Lane Allen, Stockton, K. D. Wiggin, R. H. Davis, Weir Mitchell, Stimson, Fox, Frederic, Waterloo, Twain, Bret Harte, Howells, James, Marion Crawford, John Oliver Hobbes, C. E. Craddock, Hamlin Garland, Opie Read-that's more than a score straight off, and every one of them does good work that wins general favour.

We refrain from commenting upon the syntactical eccentricities of the above, but the curious collection of names certainly commands attention. We know Gertrude Atherton, but we confess that Atherton is a total stranger to us. With Lane Allen we positively decline acquaintance, while there is one Mr. James Lane Allen, whom we regard as among the very best of contemporary American writers. And, among others, who under the sun are Twain, K. D. Wiggin and C. E. Craddock?

To satisfy the many inquiries as to the pronunciation of the name Janice, we are informed by Mr. Ford that it is of French Huguenot extraction, and was actually in use in New Jersey not far from the time that the events of Janice Meredith are placed in the Boudinot family. It should, therefore, be pronounced Jǎn'eece. While on this subject, it may be of interest to add that the exception most frequently taken by the reviewers -the girl's use of "Dadda" and "Mommy" is, historically speaking, unjustified. In the journal of Sally Wistar, written in the year 1778, near Philadelphia, her father is always spoken of as "Dadda;" and there is in existence series of letters of Miss Ambler, of Virginia, addressed to "Dear Mommy," and others in which she uses the same term in writing to others of her mother.

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The subject of the Valhalla Eleven introduced in the November number of THE BOOKMAN, and since discussed in two more recent numbers, will not, it seems, be downed. During the last few weeks we have received several more letters of suggestion and criticism, and if we were to be guided by our personal inclinations, we should continue the argu

uary number of THE BOOKMAN. While we are not in the habit of publishing or commenting upon criticisms of signed papers of our contributors, we deem it just to make an exception in this case, especially as Mr. Dredd expresses himself as quite satisfied that we should trample upon his sensibilities as savagely as we see fit. The question which has provoked the most discussion in the correspondence between the authors and the critic is that of the structure which served as the original of the Maison Vauquer of Balzac's Le Père Goriot. The Stones of Paris identified this house as No. 24 Rue Tournefort, whereas the reviewer found more consistent with Balzac's text a building a hundred yards away in the Rue Lhomond. Mr. Martin, after conceding that the latter structure has much in common with the pension where Vautrin builded his diabolical schemes and where Père Goriot suffered and died, brings to bear such arguments as to incline us to acknowledge that his is the far better case.

By all odds the most puerile and unreasonable complaint that one hears from literary workers is that the more obvious and inviting themes have all been worked threadbare, and that one in search of originality must go to the improbable and bizarre. This is far from being absolutely true of any literature: in this country the complaint is, on the face of it, absurd. Allusion has been made in THE BOOKMAN to the vast dramatic possibilities of the New York boarding house as a background for fiction. We can suggest, almost offhand, other phases of American life that not only have not been worn threadbare, but have in reality never been fully discovered.

For instance, we would have very little hesitation in predicting success to the young man of industry and real literary talent who will thoroughly study the life of the conventional American small town -not especially the New England town, or the Western or the Southern town, but the American town. Let him study all the factors of this really complex life and their relations toward each other. Let him keep well in hand his sense of humour, study the social life, its distinc

tions, its complications, its scandals; let him know the local newspaper offices, the tax receiver's office; above all, let him know every detail of the town's political life, the aspirations of prospective councilmen, the men whose votes are for sale and the men who buy them; and when he really knows all this he will have the material for not one but a dozen strong and vitally interesting novels. This suggestion may be offered to a young man, but hardly to a young woman. In the first place, she will not see it, and then she would ignore it if she did. A young woman who writes and who aspires to treat realistically of this very life to which we allude recently blandly confessed that she had no idea of what a "primary" was, though she surmised that it had something to do with the Board of Education. She was quite satisfied and content. Politics were vulgar, and, besides, what had they to do with fiction? What she was after was the "love interest." Well, the "love interest" should, perhaps, not be ignored, but the fact remains that it is a fetichism which has spoiled many good novels and many good plays, and that absurd belief in the cant phrase is one of the greatest barriers in the way of true and good literature.

Probably no profession but that of the clergyman has been treated in American fiction with any degree of adequacy. The physician's has not; the newspaperman's has not, despite the flattering partiality of feminine purveyors of fiction for "brainy young journalists." The term "literary man' was once one of dignity and respectability; and yet so much has it been abused that it is doubtful if any sane, normal, intelligent man will hear it applied to himself with perfect equanimity. Any ill-balanced witness in a police court case and without ostensible occupation may be relied on to inform the court that he is a "literary man." And this is the type that the public takes quite seriously, just as it greedily swallows the "journalist" of feminine fiction who writes manuscript and is "kind” to mere reporters.

But of all the professions, the richest in unworked literary material is probably that of the law. One could not easily

overestimate the debt which the whole great scheme of the Comédie Humaine owes to the brief period of his early life which Honoré de Balzac spent in the office of a notary. It was there that he got at the very heart of modern life. There he learned the meaning of money, not in its vulgar sense, but as a great moving and working factor and force in human society. That period was brief, but then and there was laid the foundation upon which the whole fabric of the Comédie was raised stone by stone. It is between the lines of the lawyer's brief that much of the real romance of the future will be found. A well-known sociological writer with whom we recently discussed the subject suggested that in the history of the New York Bar there was enough material to furnish a different plot to every man and woman who aspired to write a novel. We rather feel that he overestimated the New York Bar. However, he told what he said was a typical story, vouching for the accuracy of every detail, and this story we must concede was simply wonderful in its dramatic elements. It concerned a former New York District Attorney, a New York daily newspaper and one of the most notorious murder trials in the history of the country. It let in a full flood of light upon events familiar to every New Yorker. It treated of people whose names are known wherever an American newspaper is read. In short, it was a story containing every element of romance to such a degree that if served up as fiction it would probably be branded as downright sensationalism by a reading public which seems to think that the novel to be true to life must deal essentially with five-o'clock-tea ideas and twilight dialogue.

It is understood that Mr. Stephen Phillips has received from several American theatrical managers, among them Mr. Richard Mansfield, offers for the American rights of Paolo and Francesca. Mr. Phillips, however, had already made an arrangement with Mr. Alexander, who declines to surrender the American rights, as he intends making the play a feature of his American tour. Mr. Phillips has also had a proposal to translate and produce Paolo and Francesca in Paris, and it is said he is to write another

Mr. F. Marion Crawford, whose romance of the Second Crusade, Via Crucis, is reviewed elsewhere in the present number of THE BOOKMAN, left America on the 24th of February, sailing for Italy by the North German Lloyd steamship Aller. He expects to remain in Rome for about a fortnight after his arrival, and will then go to his home at Sorrento, where he will stay during the spring and summer. His historical book, The Rulers of the South, to which we alluded in the January number of THE BOOKMAN, is to be illustrated by the Danish artist Henry Brokman. Mr. Brokman, who is a personal friend of Mr. Crawford, has travelled all through the south of Italy and Sicily in company with the author. Mr. Crawford expects to return to New York in the autumn, when Miss Viola Allen will appear in Lorimer Stoddard's dramatisation of his forthcoming novel, In the Palace of the King, a love story of Madrid in 1570. Via Crucis is now in its seventieth thou