"ROOM FOR A BIG ONE!"
Cromwell. "Now then, your Majesties, I hope I don't intrude!"
"OH, YOU WICKED STORY!"
(Cry of the Cockney Street Child.)
Speaking of our Neo-Neurotic and "Personal" Novelists, James Payn says: "None of the authors of these works are storytellers." No, not in his own honest, wholesome, stirring sense, certainly. But, like other naughty—and nasty-minded—children, they "tell stories" in their own way; "great big stories," too, and "tales out of school" into the bargain. Having, like the Needy Knife-grinder, no story (in the true sense) to tell, they tell—well, let us say, tara-diddles! Truth is stranger than even their fiction, but it is not always so "smart" or so "risky" as a loose, long-winded, flippant, cynical and personal literary "lie which is half a truth," in three sloppy, slangy, but "smart"—oh, yes, decidedly "smart"—volumes! [100]
LYRE AND LANCET.
(A Story in Scenes.)