Dec. £0.
There is no more arresting, Phenomenon in the present out-Put of literature from the world's presses than the predominence of the detective story. It is some' forty years since the then almost unknown Conan Doyle launched "Sherlock Holmes" on his famous career as an amateur detective. The lode proved to be a fabulously rich one and has been worked ever since, with increasing assiduity, by a host of imitators amongst whom the original discoverer has scarcely an equal and certainly no superior. Amongst the readers of this class of fiction are eminent statesmen and celebrated-divines as well as eager youths and allegedly bashful maidens. The exploits and escapes of daring criminals seem to have a grim fascination for the most mild-mannered and timorous persons. It must be that in all of us there lurks the potential lawbreaker, We love to: contemplate ourselves, disrobed of all the conventions, pursuing our daring way through. the labyrinths' of crime dos caping through the meshes of the law by the narrowest squeez~ es. We "know that we are deceiving ourselves and that, if some magician -offered us. the cloak of invisibility and guar-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.