d, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm to
the object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions are
not the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignant
grief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of stature
how you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writer
belongs. Mr. Barrie _has_ genius--which is a slightly different thing.
But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters is 'as just and mere a
serving-man as any born of woman,' and there has been as much banging
of the paragraphic drum concerning him, and as assured a proclamation of
his mastership, as if every high quality of genius were recognisable in
him at a glance. If I knew of any unmistakable and tangible reason for
all this I would not hesitate to name it, but I am not in the secret,
and I have no right to guess. There are some sort of strings somewhere,
and somebody pulls them. So much is evident on the face of things.
Who work the contemptible _fantoccini_ who gesticulate to the Ephesian
hubbub of 'greatness' I neither know nor care, but it is simply out of
credence that their motions are spontaneous.

_Expede Herculem_. I will take a solitary story from Mr. Crockett's
'Stickit Minister.'

It is called 'The Courtship of Allan Fairley,' The tale is of a young
minister of the peasant class, whose parents through much privation have
kept their son at college. He is elected to a living in an aristocratic
parish, and takes his old peasant mother to keep house for him. Some of
his more polished parishioners object to the old lady's presence at the
manse, and they have the rather astonishing impertinence to propose
that the son shall send her away. He refuses, and shows his visitors the
door. These are the bare lines of the story so far as we are concerned
with it.

Think how Dr. Macdonald or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The
humour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of the
deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. The
story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast.
The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine
faculty could not have failed to see and to utilise some of them. Mr.
Crockett misses every conceivable point of his own tale, and with a
majestic clumsiness drags in the one thing which could possibly make it
offensive. The minister has nothing to fear from his visitors, for it is
expre