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148 not know that his vogue is the mere sum total of the appreciation of thousands of imbeciles at a given moment of their development, and that he has only got to live a few years to see that development pass into a new phase wherein he will have no place. Yet what a chance he had, in all that huge and untouched mass of local colour afforded by 'the little Manx nation'! One thinks of what Tolstoï has done, with regard to the old life of the Caucasus, with a fraction of the amount. And all, absolutely all that Mr. Caine could make of it was to produce dead characters moving in dead scenes, the ghastly old fictional types, tricked out with the apparatus of pseudo-'sagas,' pseudo-'prose-poems,' and heaven knows what not, with just enough pretension about the method to make countless shoals of silly people, tinged with the current claptrap culture of the hour, think they were indulging in something intellectually superior. With open mouths they read the author's thanks to Mr. Brown, member of the Manx Legislature, for valuable information concerning the amorous proclivities of the Manx cats; or saw how Rabbi Jones was dragged in to guarantee the burial customs of the sausage-sellers of the Sahara; or learned that Herr Robinson had courageously read all the proof-sheets of the New Saga and had escaped alive to tell the tale. But how, in this year of grace