But it has exactly the same kind of exciting quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it is.

But the element which is important, and which now requires pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered.

In order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some little way in literary history.
I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_.

However that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution in the poetical manner of looking at things.

The first is Goldsmith's almost too well known "When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her guilt away ?" Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of note, the voice of Burns:-- "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' of care?
Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird, That sings upon the bough, Thou minds me of the happy days When my fause Love was true." A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man.