SOURCE: "Arthur Machen," in The Bookman, London, Vol. LXII, No. 372, September, 1922, pp. 240-42.

In the following essay, Roberts briefly compares Machen's short stories to those of Edgar Allan Poe.

There are authors who are more to us than any individual book of theirs, just as there are authors who seem less than their masterpieces. Paradise Lost or Areopagitica mean something more magnificent to the mind than John Milton; but Charles Lamb is more than all his essays, and Johnson bigger than his own works or Boswell's biography. It is to the latter class that Mr. Machen belongs. Of living authors he alone, with Mr. Chesterton, furnishes the sensation that much of him, if not most of him, still remains unwritten, and will probably always remain unwritten. His last book, The Secret Glory, which has beautiful things, does not take his admirers any further than did The Hill of...