This is an essay from Peck's book Studies in Several Literatures from 1909. His talks about Voltaire, Poe, Gaboriau, and Doyle are quite good and very intelligently spoken of. Peck was an American classical scholar, author, editor, historian and critic. (Wikipedia) In 1906 he published a nearly 800-page monument of progressive historiography, Twenty Years of the Republic 1885-1905, expansive, dense with detail and reference, penetrating, scathing in its revelations of actual social, economic and political conditions. It was excoriated in the metropolitan press and plainly had much to do with his later difficulties. (avaliable at Librivox.) This was read online at Internet Archive and Hathi Trust.
