htful than the chapter in which Mrs. Wilcox takes us through the
list of the great writers she has known. We are almost as much pleased
by the authoress's confident expectation that we shall be thrilled
to learn any new fact about Miss Aldrich, who wrote "one of the most
exquisite lyrics in the language"; about Rhoda Hero Dunn, "a genius"
with "an almost Shakespearean quality in her verse," or about Elsa
Barker, whose poem _The Frozen Grail_, "dedicated to Peary and his band,
is an epic of august beauty," and whose sonnet _When I am Dead_ "ranks
with the great sonnets of the world," as she would be surprised to
discover that we had never heard of one of them. Mrs. Wilcox believed,
in perfect good faith, that the crowd of magazine-makers with whom she
associated were, in fact, the great figures of the age. She had no
reason for supposing that we should not be as much interested in
first-hand personal gossip about Zona Gale and Ridgeley Torrence, Arthur
Grissom (first editor of the _Smart Set_), Judge Malone, Theodosia
Garrison, and Julie Opp Faversham ("even to talk with whom over the
telephone gives me a sense of larger horizons") as we should have been
in similar gossip about Swinburne and Hardy, Henry James and Mallarme,
Laforgue, Anatole France, Tolstoy, Tchekov, or Dostoevsky.

And, as Mrs. Wilcox had no reason for supposing that her friends were
not the greatest writers alive, what reason had she for supposing that
they were not the greatest that ever lived? Without the taste, the
intelligence, or the knowledge which alone can give some notion of
what's what in art, she was obliged to rely on more accessible criteria.
The circulation of her own works, for instance, must have compared
favourably with that of most poets. To be sure there was Shakespeare and
the celebrated Hugo--or was it Gambetta? But what grounds could there be
for thinking that she was not superior to the obscure John Donne or the
obscurer Andrew Marvel, or to Arthur Rimbaud, of whom no one she had
ever heard of had ever heard? Mrs. Wilcox was not dishonest in assuming
that the most successful writer in her set was the best in the world;
she was not conceited even; she was merely ridiculous.

It is disquieting to find the same sort of thing going on in England,
where our painters are fiercely disputing with each other the crown of
European painting, and our critics appraising the respective claims
of Mr. Augustus John and Mr. John Nash as solemnly