They are stories which invite criticism and yet defy it.  The great batsman at cricket is the man who can play an unorthodox game, take every liberty which is denied to inferior players, and yet succeed brilliantly in the face of his disregard of law.  So it is here.  I should think the model of these stories is the most dangerous that any young writer could follow.  There is digression, that most deadly fault in the short narrative; there is incoherence, there is want of proportion which makes the story stand still for pages and bound forward in a few sentences.  But genius overrides all that, just as the great cricketer hooks the off ball and glides the straight one to leg.  There is a dash, an exuberance, a full-blooded, confident mastery which carries everything before it.  Yes, no team of immortals would be complete which did not contain at least two representatives of Kipling.

And now whom?  Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest degree to me.  The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave me.  It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect.  Indeed, I have been more affected by some of the short work of his son Julian, though I can quite understand the high artistic claims which the senior writer has, and the delicate charm of his style.  There is Bulwer Lytton as a claimant.  His “Haunted and the Haunters” is the very best ghost story that I know.  As such I should include it in my list.  There was a story, too, in one of the old Blackwoods—­“Metempsychosis” it was called, which left so deep an impression upon my mind that I should be inclined, though it is many years since I read it, to number it with the best.  Another story which has the characteristics of great work is Grant Allen’s “John Creedy.”  So good a story upon so philosophic a basis deserves a place among the best.  There is some first-class work to be picked also from the contemporary work of Wells and of Quiller-Couch which reaches a high standard.  One little sketch—­“Old Oeson” in “Noughts and Crosses”—­is, in my opinion, as good as anything of the kind which I have ever read.

And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover of Poe.  I am sure that if I had to name the few books which have really influenced my own life I should have to put this one second only to Macaulay’s Essays.  I read it young when my mind was plastic.  It stimulated my imagination and set before me a supreme example of dignity and force in the methods of telling a story.  It is not altogether a healthy influence, perhaps.  It turns the thoughts too forcibly to the morbid and the strange.

He was a saturnine creature, devoid of humour and geniality, with a love for the grotesque and the terrible.  The reader must himself furnish the counteracting qualities or Poe may become a dangerous comrade.  We know along what perilous tracks and into what deadly quagmires his strange mind led him, down to that grey October Sunday morning when he was picked up, a dying man, on the side-walk at Baltimore, at an age which should have seen him at the very prime of his strength and his manhood.