A little over a year ago there appeared in a well-known English magazine a short paper which, thong" unsigned, created a deep impression upon all who took the trouble to appreciate it. These pages from the "New Uibbon" revealed unusual powers of observation, a keen sense of humour, and a remarkable capacity for polished, yet mordant satire. The unmistakable style, of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Em pire" was imitated with scrupulous care, and with astonishing success. " 'The Reces sional' of the sublime Kipling, and the economic speculations of the inquisitive, but censorious, Mallock, fell alike unheeded on the ears of those who were content to argue that the condition of the lower orders, though insufficient to their own appetence, was luxurious compared to that of their fel lows abroad, while the easy splendour of the rich inflamed the emulation of all man kind." There is more here than a fine sense of the fitness of words, and a subtle felicity in their choice. There is something in the peculiar mannerism of Gibbon—in his care fully balanced epithets and antithetical epi grams—that lend itself witn mysterious force to an imaginative, a realistic, and, above all, a humorous genius. " The Englishman of the beginning of ths 19t!l centtiry was accus tomed to demand that his policy should be glorious, the accessories of his daily life un surpassed in quality—the objects of his asthetic admiration beautiful. The English man of the end of that period of decadence was content if they were cheap." It is sometimes hard to remember in glancing over these pages thafc one is not reading the famous indictment of the follies, the vices, and the splendours of Imperial Rome in its day of "gigantic opulenoe and Titanic sin." And the sense of reminiscences is especially strong when the "New Gibbon," treading closely in his masters steps, employs in personal description the irony which in the great historian's hands was so trenchant a weapon. "A Palmerston and a Disraeli had been the spokesman of the earlier Imperial ism; the later found its mouthpiece in a Chamberlain. 