lure; on the other hand, success
carries great rewards.

Of course, the idea is not a new one. The writings of the alchemists are
stories of the Impossible. The fashion has never been entirely extinct.
Balzac wrote the "Peau de Chagrin," and probably this tale is as good a
one as was ever written of that kind. The possessor of the Skin may have
every thing he wishes for; but each wish causes the Skin to shrink, and
when it is all gone the wisher is annihilated with it. By the art of the
writer this impossible thing is made to appear quite feasible; by
touching the chords of coincidence and fatality, the reader's
common-sense is soothed to sleep. We feel that all this might be, and
yet no natural law be violated; and yet we know that such a thing never
was and never will be. But the vitality of the story, as of all good
stories of the sort, is due to the fact that it is the symbol of a
spiritual verity: the life of indulgence, the selfish life, destroys
the soul. This psychic truth is so deeply felt that its sensible
embodiment is rendered plausible. In the case of another famous
romance--"Frankenstein"--the technical art is entirely wanting: a worse
story from the literary point of view has seldom been written. But the
soul of it, so to speak, is so potent and obvious that, although no one
actually reads the book nowadays, everybody knows the gist of the idea.
"Frankenstein" has entered into the language, for it utters a perpetual
truth of human nature.

At the present moment the most conspicuous success in the line we are
considering is Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The author's
literary skill, in that awful little parable, is at its best, and makes
the most of every point. To my thinking, it is an artistic mistake to
describe Hyde's transformation as actually taking place in plain sight
of the audience; the sense of spiritual mystery is thereby lost, and a
mere brute miracle takes its place. But the tale is strong enough to
carry this imperfection, and the moral significance of it is so
catholic--it so comes home to every soul that considers it--that it has
already made an ineffaceable impression on the public mind. Every man is
his own Jekyll and Hyde, only without the magic powder. On the bookshelf
of the Impossible, Mr. Stevenson's book may take its place beside
Balzac's.

Mr. Oscar Wilde, the apostle of beauty, has in the July number of
_Lippincott's Magazine_, a novel, or romance (it partakes of the