Dialogues have come back into fashion and favor. Editors of magazines look on them kindly, and readers of magazines accept them as philosophically as they accept any other form of instruction or entertainment which is provided in their monthly bills of fare. Perhaps Mr. Oscar Wilde is in some measure responsible for the revival; perhaps it may be traced more directly to the serious and stimulating author of “Baldwin,” whose discussions are sufficiently subtle and relentless to gratify the keenest discontent. The restless reader who embarks on Vernon Lee’s portly volume of conversations half wishes he knew people who could discourse in that fashion, and is half grateful that he doesn’t. To converse for hours on “Doubts and Pessimism,” or “The Value of the Ideal,” is no trivial test of endurance, especially when one person does three-fourths of the talking. We hardly know which to admire most: Baldwin,{212} who elucidates a text—and that text, evolution—for six pages at a breath, or Michael, who listens and “............