d from the mystic fear
of the Goth, while he yearned for the great day flame of the classics.
Even his Japonisme was skin-deep.

Miss Bisland relates the uneventful career of Hearn in an unaffected
manner. He was loved by his friends, while he often ran away from
them. Solitary, eccentric, Hearn was an unhappy man. He was born June
27, 1850, on one of the Ionian Isles, Santa Maura, called in modern
Greek, Leokus, or Lafcada, the Sappho Leucadia, promontory and all.
His father was Charles Bush Hearn, of an old Dorsetshire
family--Hearn, however, is a Romany name--and an Irishman. His mother
was Rosa Cerigote, a Greek, whose brothers, it is said, stabbed their
sister's suitor, but she, Isolde-like, nursed him, and he married her.
The marriage was not a happy one. Young Lafcadio drifted to Ireland,
was adopted by a rich aunt of Doctor Hearn's, a Mrs. Brenane, and went
with her to Wales. He is said to have been educated in the north of
France at a Jesuit college. He learned the language there. Later he
was at Ushan, the Roman Catholic college of Durham. His life long he
hated this religion, hated it in a superstitious fashion, and seemed
to have suffered from a sort of persecution mania--he fancied Jesuits
were plotting against him. At school he lost the sight of one eye
through an accident while at play. In 1869 Hearn was five feet three
inches tall, weighed one hundred and thirty-seven pounds, and had a
chest measurement of thirty-six and three-fourths inches. Disappointed
of an expected inheritance--his grandaunt left him nothing--he went to
London with his head full of dreams, but his pockets were empty. In
1869 he landed in New York, penniless, poor in health, half blind,
friendless, and very ambitious.

In this biography you may follow him through the black and coiling
poverty, a mean and bitter life compared with which the career of
Robert Louis Stevenson was the triumphal procession of a Prince
Charming of letters. He landed finally in Cincinnati, where he
secured an unimportant position on _The Enquirer_. His friends at that
time were H. E. Krehbiel, Joseph Tunison, and H. F. Farney, the
artist. His letters, printed in this volume, and ranging from 1877 to
1889, addressed to Mr. Krehbiel, are the most interesting for the
students of Hearn the literary aspirant. He envies the solid
architecture of that music-critic's prose, but realises that it is not
for him--lack of structure is his chief deficiency. But he
pas