ust and
sandal-wood and sesame and cloth of gold and black slaves with
scimitars--to whom do I owe it but this rare and delightful artist? 'O
mes chers _Mille et une Nuits_!' says Fantasio, and he speaks in the name
of all them that have lived the life that Galland alone made possible.
The damsels of the new style may 'laugh till they fall backwards,' etc.,
through forty volumes instead of ten, and I shall still go back to my
Galland. I shall go back to him because his masterpiece is--not a book
of reference, nor a curiosity of literature, nor an achievement in
pedantry, nor even a demonstration of the absolute failure of Islamism as
an influence that makes for righteousness, but--an excellent piece of
art.

RICHARDSON

His Fortune.

It is many years since Richardson fell into desuetude; it is many years
since he became the novelist not of the world at large but of that
inconsiderable section of the world which is interested in literature.
His methods are those of a bygone epoch; his ideals, with one or two
exceptions, are old-fashioned enough to seem fantastic; his sentiment
belongs to ancient history; to a generation bred upon Ouida's romances
and the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merely
questionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived he
was adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of 'good,
thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke'; he was the idol of female
England, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best of
mankind. Johnson revered him--Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot ranked
him with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George Sand he was the
greatest novelist of all time; Rousseau imitated him; Macaulay wrote and
talked of him with an enthusiasm that would have sat becomingly on Lady
Bradshaigh herself. But all that is over. Not even the emasculation to
which the late Mr. Dallas was pleased to subject his _Clarissa_ could
make that _Clarissa_ at all popular; not all the allusions of all the
leader-writers of a leader-writing age have been able to persuade the
public to renew its interest in the works and ways of Grandison the
august and the lovely and high-souled Harriet Byron. Richardson has to
be not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed like
a lollipop, but attacked _secundum artem_ like a dinner of many courses
and wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, you
must