and clever enough, but they are wanting in the individuality and in the completeness of the genuine Short-story.  Like the brief tales to be seen in the English monthly magazines and in the Sunday editions of American newspapers into which they are copied, they are, for the most part, either merely amplified anecdotes or else incidents which might have been used in a Novel just as well as not.  Now, the genuine Short-story abhors the idea of the Novel.  It can be conceived neither as part of a Novel nor as elaborated and expanded so as to form a Novel.  A good Short-story is no more the synopsis of a Novel than it is an episode from a Novel.  A slight Novel, or a Novel cut down, is a Novelette:  it is not a Short-story.  Mr. Howells’s “Their Wedding Journey” and Miss Howard’s “One Summer” are Novelettes, although an American editor, who had offered a prize for a list of the ten best Short-stories, allowed them to be included.  Mr. Anstey’s “Vice Versa,” Mr. Besant’s “Case of Mr. Lucraft,” and Mr. Hugh Conway’s “Called Back” are Short-stories in conception, although they are without the compression which the Short-story requires.  In the acute and learned essay on vers de societe which Mr. Frederick Locker prefixed to his admirable “Lyra Elegantiarum,” he declared that the two characteristics of the best vers de societe were brevity and brilliancy, and that “The Rape of the Lock” would be the type and model of the best vers de societe—­if it were not just a little too long.  So it is with “The Case of Mr. Lucraft,” with “Vice Versa,” with “Called Back:”  they are just a little too long.

It is to be noted as a curious coincidence that there is no exact word in English to designate either vers de societe or the Short-story, and yet in no language are there better vers de societe or Short-stories than in English.  It may be remarked also that there is a certain likeness between vers de societe and Short-stories:  for one thing, both seem easy and are hard to write.  And the typical qualifications of each may apply with almost equal force to the other:  vers de societe should reveal compression, ingenuity, and originality, and Short-stories should have brevity and brilliancy.  In no class of writing are neatness of construction and polish of execution more needed than in the writing of vers de societe and of Short-stories.  The writer of Short-stories must have the sense of form, which Mr. Lathrop has called “the highest and last attribute of a creative writer.”  The construction must be logical, adequate, harmonious.  Here is the weak spot in Mr. Bishop’s “One of the Thirty Pieces,” the fundamental idea of which has extraordinary strength perhaps not fully developed in the story.  But others of Mr. Bishop’s stories—­“The Battle of Bunkerloo,” for instance—­are admirable in all ways, conception and execution having an even excellence.  Again, Mr. Hugh Conway’s “Daughter of the Stars” is a Short-story which fails from sheer