[Illustration:  “JAMES M. BARRIE”]

Above all, the St. James’s Gazette had published the first of the ’Auld Licht Idylls’ November 17th, 1884; and the editor, Frederick Greenwood, instantly perceiving a new and rich genius, advised him to work the vein further, enforcing the advice by refusing to accept his contributions on other subjects.

He had the usual painful struggle to become a successful journalist, detailed in ‘When a Man’s Single’; but his real work was other and greater.  In 1887 ‘When a Man’s Single’ came out serially in the British Weekly; it has little merit except in the Scottish prelude, which is of high quality in style and pathos.  It is curious how utterly his powers desert him the moment he leaves his native heath:  like Antaeus, he is a giant on his mother earth and a pigmy off it.  His first published book was ‘Better Dead’ (1887); it works out a cynical idea which would be amusing in five pages, but is diluted into tediousness by being spread over fifty.  But in 1889 came a second masterpiece, ‘A Window in Thrums,’ a continuation of the Auld Licht series from an inside instead of an outside standpoint,—­not superior to the first, but their full equals in a deliciousness of which one cannot say how much is matter and how much style.  ‘My Lady Nicotine’ appeared in 1890; it was very popular, and has some amusing sketches, but no enduring quality.  ‘An Edinburgh Eleven’ (1890) is a set of sketches of his classmates and professors.

In 1891 the third of his Scotch works appeared,—­’The Little Minister,’—­which raised him from the rank of an admirable sketch writer to that of an admirable novelist, despite its fantastic plot and detail.  Since then he has written three plays,—­’Walker, London,’ ’Jane Annie,’ and ‘The Professor’s Love Story,’ the latter very successful and adding to his reputation; but no literature except his novel ‘Sentimental Tommy,’ just closed in Scribner’s Magazine.  This novel is not only a great advance on ‘The Little Minister’ in symmetry of construction, reality of matter, tragic power, and insight, but its tone is very different.  Though as rich in humor, the humor is largely of a grim, bitter, and sardonic sort.  The light, gay, buoyant fun of ’The Little Minister,’ which makes it a perpetual enjoyment, has mostly vanished; in its stead we feel that the writer’s sensitive nature is wrung by the swarming catastrophes he cannot avert, the endless wrecks on the ocean of life he cannot succor, and hardly less by those spiritual tragedies and ironies so much worse, on a true scale of valuation, than any material misfortune.