The death of James Stephens is a loss not only
to letters but also to broadcasting, for he had the gift of projecting something of his individual charm and sense of poetic fantasy whenever he spoke over the air. For most people mention of his name recalled his first and most successful production, The Crock of Gold, a delightful book of prose fairy-tales which appeared in 1912. But The Crock of Gold did not always mean James Stephens. In the eighteen- forties it meant Martin Tupper, who followed up the prodigious success of his Proverbial Philosophy by writing under Stephens's title what Hawthorne conceded to be " a very powerful tale." Tupper's Crock of Gold went through five editions in England, was turned into a successful melodrama, was serialised in French and German newspapers, and was highly popular in America. And yet by 1912 the book was so dead that Stephens and his publishers
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