d it a convenient pose. Your flora and your fauna are
always receiving additions; while my garden is withered; my zoo is out of
repair. The bars are broken; the tanks have run dry. There is hardly a
trace of life except in the snake-house, and, as I mentioned, the last
giraffe is dead.

L. C. Our friend, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, is fortunately able to give us
a different account of the institution in Regent's Park. You are quite
wrong about modern painting. None of the younger men can paint at all. A
few of them can draw, I admit. It is all they can do. The death of
Charles Furse blasted all my hopes of English art. Whistler is dead;
Sargent is an American.

L. T. Well, so is Henry James, if it comes to that. And so _was_
Whistler. But I have seen the works of several young artists who I
understand are carrying out the great traditions of painting. Ricketts,
Shannon, Wilson Steer, Rothenstein, Orpen, Nicholson, Augustus John are
surely worthy successors to Turner, Alfred Stevens, and the
Pre-Raphaelites.

L. C. They are merely connoisseurs gifted with expressing their
appreciation of the past in paint. They appeal to you as a literary man.
You like to detect in every stroke of their brushes an echo of the past.
Their pictures have been _heard_, not _seen_. All the younger artists
are committing burglary on the old masters.

L. T. It is you who are a disappointed optimist.

L. C. Not about literature or the drama. I seem to hear, with Ibsen's
'Master Builder,' the younger generation knocking at the door.

L. T. It comes in without knocking in my experience; and generally has
_fig_-leaves in its hair--a decided advance on the coiffure of Hedda
Gabler's lover.

L. C. But look at Bernard Shaw.

L. T. Why should I look at Bernard Shaw? I read his plays and am more
than ever convinced that he has gone on the wrong lines. His was the
opportunity. He made _il gran refuto_. Some one said that George
Saintsbury never got over the first night of _Hernani_. Shaw never
recovered the _premiere_ of _Ghosts_. He roofed our Thespian temple with
Irish slate. His disciples found English drama solid brick and leave it
plaster of Paris. Yet Shaw might have been another Congreve.

L. C. _Troja fuit_. We do not want another. I am sure you never went
to the Court at all.

L. T. Oh, yes, I attended the last _levee_. But the drama is too large
a subject, or, in England, too small a subject to discuss