most supercilious way, as having written an
occasional good poem. I am much struck by Robinson's two poems which you
sent Mother. What a queer, mystical creature he is! I did not understand
one of them--that about the gardens--and I do not know that I like
either of them quite as much as some of those in "The Children of the
Night." But he certainly has got the real spirit of poetry in him.
Whether he can make it come out I am not quite sure.

Prince Louis of Battenberg has been here and I have been very much
pleased with him. He is a really good admiral, and in addition he is a
well-read and cultivated man and it was charming to talk with him. We
had him and his nephew, Prince Alexander, a midshipman, to lunch alone
with us, and we really enjoyed having them. At the State dinner he sat
between me and Bonaparte, and I could not help smiling to myself in
thinking that here was this British Admiral seated beside the American
Secretary of the Navy--the American Secretary of the Navy being the
grandnephew of Napoleon and the grandson of Jerome, King of Westphalia;
while the British Admiral was the grandson of a Hessian general who was
the subject of King Jerome and served under Napoleon, and then, by no
means creditably, deserted him in the middle of the Battle of Leipsic.

I am off to vote to-night.

NOVELS AND GAMES

White House, November 19, 1905.

DEAR KERMIT:

I sympathize with every word you say in your letter, about Nicholas
Nickleby, and about novels generally. Normally I only care for a novel
if the ending is good, and I quite agree with you that if the hero has
to die he ought to die worthily and nobly, so that our sorrow at the
tragedy shall be tempered with the joy and pride one always feels when
a man does his duty well and bravely. There is quite enough sorrow and
shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for
meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was
my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and
unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had
shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use
whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and
crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there
is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really
does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which
healthy people