the other sees every book as part of the phenomena of books.

From this point of view, every critique is a confession of faith and the exposition of a philosophy. Such a critic will not cut his cloth to his book, but submit the book to the jurisdiction of first-hand principles. If he is wrong, I would still assert that by the possession of critical "opinions" and preoccupations, he is less remote from the truth and from the wise exercise of his craft than the critic in the possession of none. Just as religious, moral and æsthetic beliefs make up a critical personality, so the idea of a book cannot be separated from its style and construction. For, according to the ratio of a man's convictions and belief in his work, will be his capacity to do that work properly. Training and conviction are indispensable to a critic, and indeed, no bad solvents for the complexities of modern life in general. The only point where compromise in such tenets-arbitrary tenets if you will-is at all permissible, is in the method of treatment. Virulence, no less than effusiveness, impairs the artistic poise of the critic. In the survey of books there is room for the expository catalogue; there always has been and always ought to be for the genuine critic; but there is none for the intermediate reviewer. For one thing, having nothing of his own to say, he is inevitably unreadable; true artistic conviction, on the other hand, carries its own interest and validity. The knowledgeable critic is, of course, a nuisance to editors and publishers; is that a sufficient reason to abolish him ?

I acknowledge that the remedy I suggest is a counsel of perfection, which is always regarded as so impracticable and is the only thing worth living for. The critic should

look upon himself—his public and his editors should look upon him, as an artist. Under the present system, I doubt the public and the editors. But at any rate, let the critic do the worthiest and the best for himself he can. Let him not be ashamed both to ransack the past and to speculate upon the future, to combine practical experience with general ideas, to know a thing and see what it means. For he has four duties which he cannot ignore. He must see his age from a distance and try to form and express a definite conception of it; the literatures both of the present and the past are to some extent in his hands for him to stimulate the public with the one and to remind it of the other; he has not only to guard the public taste from shams but, in so far as lies in his power, to help to form it; and lastly and most important of all, he must cultivate his sense of humanity. If I seem to be claiming too much for reviewing, reviewers, and public (though surely the guild or community of critics should be proud of one another), let me quote Ben Jonson :

"It is a false quarrel against Nature, that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which, if they lose it, is through their own sluggishness, and by that means they become her prodigies, not her children."

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If you think that, as a result of these last few rambling papers, I am going to explode a theory of education upon you, you have mistaken the aim and meaning of these letters. They are what a reviewer might call "bric-à-brac " or " olla podrida," and there I leave them. In fact, having little or no knowledge about it, I have no theory of education to expound. If you will pin me down to a declaration, my dogma amounts to-more literature; if you will have me schedule and sub-schedule this generalization in the manner of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," I would say—more English literature. If you would dissect me into further particles, I would add that English literature does not begin in 1700. If you would chop me up into small pieces, I would say that the study of literature does not consist in knowing who wrote Agincourt, Agincourt!" but that literature is a vision of the best of life or it is worthless.

But I will be compromised no further. The University of Oxbridge (as our novelists will have it) has, as you know, made a tentative excursion of late years in this direction. But the authorities have so loaded the dear maid with chains, that she can only crawl on her hands

and knees. I turn to a book of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (that worthy and truly humanistic professor of Camford) as an illustration. It is called "The Art of Writing," and is so good that I prefer to leave this letter partly in his abler hands.

At the said Oxbridge, six years ago at any rate, the distinction due to a student of literature was awarded to him at the end of his course, not even according to his capacity in translating Kentish charters of the ninth century, but solely to his proficiency in expounding the mysteries of Umlaut and its etymological fellows. The theory behind this pedantic contempt of letters was, Sir Arthur thinks, a survival of the old ecclesiastical hatred of knowledge in the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages in which St. Gregory could utter this complacent sentiment : Quoniam non cognovi literaturam, introibo in potentias Domini!" Likely enough, but the theory in aggressive possession six years ago was that the study of literature being too easy an exercise for the cultivation of the mind, a mental gymnastic qua gymnastic was necessary as a counterpoise as though a knowledge of vowel-changes was any more of a gymnastic than accurate statistics of the number of matches, with their ends joined together, which would stretch from Westminster Abbey to St. Paul's Cathedral.

But to return to letters. One obvious suggestion I make to further education would be to encourage all young men from the age of twelve to twenty to write not Latin but English verse. Not with a view to publication (Apollo forbid) but as a training in the morals, manners, metaphysics, and mathematics of language. Not even as an initiation to the knighthood of poetry,

but (unless the pupil be a poet in embryo) to learn how to write prose.

Here again I lean upon Sir Arthur's manly book. A good deal of his space is occupied with the difference between verse and prose and the "capital difficulties " which each medium has to overcome. Verse, he says, has an older ancestry than prose, primarily because it is more memorable and so less reliant upon the printed text. For verse, as Sir Arthur in his analysis of poetic inversion, stress, emphasis, repetition, and metrical dependence, cannot but acknowledge, is more liable to extrinsic arrangements of words than prose. Verse, he says, is easier to write than prose, if you care to leave out the emotion which makes it characteristic and worth while.

Το say this is almost to agree that prose is more difficult as being a more complex instrument of expression. If you leave out the emotion you are bound to write bad verse but not bad prose, because prose is not to the same extent as verse the handmaid of feeling.

It is in this particular that I have one solitary little bone to pick with the author. The capital difficulty of verse, he observes, is in saying ordinary things; of prose in saying extraordinary things. As instances of the triumph of verse over this difficulty, he illustrates Homer's supreme ease in evading, heightening, or transforming the bald, flat intervals of the commonplace which are bound to occur in an epic, and the achievement of the committee of forty-seven who, by the Authorized Version, actually improved in point of range, sublimity, and magnificence of diction, upon the noble work of Coverdale, Tyndale, and Wiclif. But there is an obscurity in the phrase "capital difficulty." Does Sir Arthur mean that