Excerpt: ''With singular unanimity critics for thirty years have slighted the work of Arthur Machen. A line suffices for him in Holbrook Jackson''s ''The Eighteen Nineties,'' and Mr. Blaikie-Murdoch ignores him completely in ''The Renaissance of the Nineties''; yet those are the standard works on the period to which, chronologically, at least, Machen belongs. Mr. Turquet-Milnes, with greater appreciation, gives him a half-chapter in his scholarly work, ''The Influence of Baudelaire,'' but even that is made up largely of quotations from ''The Hill of Dreams,'' to prove Machen a descendent of Baudelaire—an error to which I subscribed until Machen himself disillusioned me, although the assertion is still partially true.''
