SHORTHORN 407 SHORT STORY ize variations and establish shorthand on a thoroughly scientific basis. SHORTHORN, a breed of cattle char- acterized by short horns, rapidity of growth, aptitude to fatten, and good tem- per. It was produced by Charles and Robert Colling, at Ketton and Barmpton, near Darlington, England, by a process of in-and-in breeding between 1780 and 1818. The Collings were imitated by R. T. and J. Booth between 1814 and 1863; by Thomas Bates between 1818 and 1849. The process has been followed in the United States since 1817. SHORTHOUSE, JOSEPH HENRY, an English novelist; born in Birmingham, England, Sept. 9, 1834. His best-known novel is "John Inglesant" (1881). His other works include: "The Little School- master, Mark" (1883-1884) ; "Sir Perci- val" (1886); "A Teacher of the Violin" (1888) ; "Blanche, Lady Falaise" (1891) ; "The Humorous in Literature"; etc. He died in 1903. SHORT STORY, THE. The anecdotal short story, which passes from tongue to tongue, and has done so since the earliest times, is no more a literary form than the riddle or the joke, although like these it may pass into literature. The literary short story is of course a much later product, although it is to be found scat- tered through the ancient literature of the Orient, of Greece, and of Rome. Notable examples of early short stories of a more or less literary character are to be found in famous collections, such as in the so-called "Arabian Nights," "The Seven Sages," the "Gesta Roma- norum," which, originating usually in the East, and in some obscurely distant pe- riod, worked their way through many languages and centuries and came into Europe in the Middle Ages. So far as modern literature is con- cerned, the importance of the literary short story really begins with the later Middle Ages in western Europe. Here, in two literatures, it became a recognized form of literary art, and was widely translated and imitated elsewhere in Eu- rope. The French fabliaux were verse short stories, originating in about the 12th cen- tury, humorous, often indecent, told or sung by the minstrels as an offset to ro- mances and love lyrics. They represent the unromantic and often the seamy side of medieval life. "La Bourse Pleine de Sens" of Jean le Galois d'Aubepierre is an example. Many fabliau plots are still familiar to us in modern humorous sto- ries. More important were the novelle, brief prose stories, usually but not always real- istic in mood, concise and pointed in form. They were written from the late 13th century onward by men of the civi- lized trading communities of Florence, Venice, and elsewhere in Italy, and though their plots are often old, they are given a local time and place, and are impregnated with the customs, the ideals, and the interests of the earliest renais- sance. The range of the novella was wider than that of the fabliau. The tragic, the romantic, as well as the hu- morous and the anecdotal, were admitted into its compact brevity; and the novelle of great writers like Boccaccio, and lesser men, like Bandello and Straparola, have become sources for some of our best known plays. "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" are examples. Mention only may be made here of the exempla, brief, didactic narratives told usually of a saint and ending in a moral, written by monks and circulating in vast collections, usually in Latin, throughout the Middle Ages. The fable, a special form of the didactic short story, was still another popular variety and likewise drifted in great collections across Europe and into all the important vernaculars. In English these various types of short stories had a sudden flowering in the works of one great author. Geoffrey Chau- cer, at the end of the 14th century, took the fabliau, the novella, the exemplum, the fable (which came to him through the so-called beast epic of "Reynard the Fox"), and filling old plots with his own humor and shrewd observation made "The Canterbury Tales," which remain for the English-speaking reader the best sum- mary of the earlier periods of the literary short story. The short story of the period of the full renaissance, the 16th and 17th cen- turies, is relatively unimportant. It is in all the greater European literatures a kind of expanded novella, usually florid in phrasing, and adorned with a rather empty romance. In English, the stories of Greene and Lodge, which Shakespeare read, are favorable examples. The latter 17th and the 18th century, pe- riods of a new didacticism and a renewed respect for concision in writing, were better seeding grounds for the short story. Here belongs the simple and direct short narrative which usually reflects in its conclusion upon some aspect of life or human nature, though often no moral is attached. The French called this the conte, and it was written in such perfect examples in verse by La Fontaine (see his "Fables"), in prose by Voltaire, Mar- montel, and Diderot, that the tradition has remained constant ever since in French literature. In England, the pe- riodical essayists, Steele, Addison, Dr.
