The three-volume system is peculiar to Great Britain:  it does not obtain either in France or the United States.  As a consequence, the French and American writer of fiction is left free to treat his subject at the length it demands,—­no more and no less.  It is pleasant to note that there are signs of the beginning of the break-up of the system even in England; and the protests of the chief English critics against it are loud and frequent.  It is responsible in great measure for the invention and perfection of the British machine for making English Novels, of which Mr. Warner told us in his entertaining essay on fiction.  We all know the work of this machine, and we all recognize the trade-mark it imprints in the corner.  But Mr. Warner failed to tell us, what nevertheless is a fact, that this British machine can be geared down so as to turn out the English short story.  Now, the English short story, as the machine makes it and as we see it in most English magazines, is only a little English Novel, or an incident or episode from an English Novel.  It is thus the exact artistic opposite of the American Short-story, of which, as we have seen, the chief characteristics are originality, ingenuity, compression, and, not infrequently, a touch of fantasy.  It is not, of course, that the good and genuine Short-story is not written in England now and then,—­for if I were to make any such assertion some of the best work of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, of Mr. Walter Besant, and of Mr. Anstey would rise up to contradict me:  it is merely that it is an accidental growth, and not a staple of production.  As a rule, in England the artist in fiction does not care to hide his light under a bushel, and he puts his best work where it will be seen of all men,—­that is to say, not in a Short-story.  So it happens that the most of the brief tales in the English magazines are not true Short-stories at all, and that they belong to a lower form of the art of fiction, in the department with the amplified anecdote.  It is the three-volume Novel which has killed the Short-story in England.

Certain of the remarks in the present paper the writer put forth first anonymously some months ago in the columns of an English weekly review.  To his intense surprise, they were controverted in a leading American weekly review.  The critic began by assuming that the writer had said that Americans preferred Short-stories to Novels.  What had really been said was that there was a steady demand for Short-stories in American magazines, whereas in England the demand was rather for serial Novels.  “In the first place,” said the critic, “Americans do not prefer Short-stories, as is shown by the enormous number of British Novels circulated among us; and in the second place, tales of the quiet, domestic kind, which form the staple of periodicals like ’All the Year Round’ and ‘Chambers’s Journal,’ have here thousands of readers where native productions, however clever and original, have only hundreds, since the