e is young, or even if he is merely new, and setting before him the
cold potato of a qualified approval. One says to him: 'You know I don't
think you are the real thing quite, but taking you on your own ground
you are not so bad. Come, you shall have a night's lodging at least, and
if you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the right direction,
there is no telling but you may be allowed to stay the week. But you
must not presume; you must not take this frosty welcome for an effect of
fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen friends.' Ten to one
the stranger does not like this sort of talk, and goes his way--the
wrong way. But, at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a liberal
spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in one's tastes; that
one can make hopeful allowances in hopeful cases."

"Such as?" the observer insinuated.

"Such as do not fit the point exactly. Very likely the case may be that
of an old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two that
we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save
in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the middle
Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that
we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty
years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our
half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal
equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence
surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of
the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or
even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes
had stiffened we could have cared only for the most modern of the
naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and Spanish schools. A
signal proof of their continued suppleness came but the other day when
we acquainted ourselves with the work of the English novelist, Mr. Percy
White, and it was the more signal because we perceived that he had
formed himself upon a method of Thackeray's, which recalled that master,
as the occasional aberrations of Payn and Trollope recall a manner of
him. But it is Thackeray's most artistic method which Mr. White recalls
in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows
Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their
unconsciousness of their own natures he find