THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM

     MORE

     YET AGAIN

     A CHRISTMAS GARLAND

     THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE

     ZULIEKA DOBSON

     SEVEN MEN

     AND EVEN NOW

     CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN

     THE POETS' CORNER

     THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL

     A BOOK OF CARICATURES

     FIFTY CARICATURES

   Stevenson, in one of his essays, tells us how he "played the sedulous ape" to Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, and other writers of the past. And the compositors of all our higher-toned newspapers keep the foregoing sentence set up in type always, so constantly does it come tripping off the pens of all higher-toned reviewers. Nor ever do I read it without a fresh thrill of respect for the young Stevenson. I, in my own very inferior boyhood, found it hard to revel in so much as a single page of any writer earlier than Thackeray. This disability I did not shake off, alas, after I left school. There seemed to be so many live authors worth reading. I gave precedence to them, and, not being much of a reader, never had time to grapple with the old masters. Meanwhile, I was already writing a little on my own account. I had had some sort of aptitude for Latin prose and Latin verse. I wondered often whether those two things, essential though they were (and are) to the making of a decent style in English prose, sufficed for the making of a style more than decent. I felt that I must have other models. And thus I acquired the habit of aping, now and 

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