Rupert's birth. Colonel Brodie never recovered
from the shock. He resides chiefly at Harrogate. Gradually the servants
all gave notice, and Hootawa ceased to attract Americans. Poor Flora! I
ought to have remembered my promise; but the habit was too strong in me.
Sir Oliver Lodge, I believe, has an explanation for the non-appearance of
the phantom after the events I have described. He regards it as a good
instance of _bypsychic duality_--the fortuitous phenomenon by which
spirits are often uncertain as to whom they really represent. But I am
only an art critic, not a physicist.'

_To_ HERBERT HORNE, ESQ.

THE ELEVENTH MUSE.

In the closing years of the last century I held the position of a
publisher's hack. Having failed in everything except sculpture, I became
publisher's reader and adviser. It was the age of the 'dicky dongs,'
and, of course, I advised chiefly the publication of deciduous
literature, or books which dealt with the history of decay. The
business, unfortunately, closed before my plans were materialised; but
there was a really brilliant series of works prepared for an ungrateful
public. A cheap and abridged edition of Gibbon was to have heralded the
'Ruined Home' Library, as we only dealt with the decline and fall of
things, and eschewed Motley in both senses of the word. 'Bad Taste in
All Ages' (twelve volumes edited by myself) would have rivalled some of
Mr. Sidney Lee's monumental undertakings. It was a memory of these
unfulfilled designs which has turned my thoughts to an old notebook--the
skeleton of what was destined never to be a book in being.

I have often wondered why no one has ever tried to form an anthology of
bad poetry. It would, of course, be easy enough to get together a dreary
little volume of unreadable and unsaleable song. There are, however,
certain stanzas so exquisite in their unconscious absurdity that an
inverted immortality may be claimed for them. It is essential that their
authors should have been serious, because parody and light verse have
been carried to such a state of perfection that a tenth muse has been
created--the muse of Mr. Owen Seaman and the late St. John Hankin for
example. When the Anakim, men of old, which were men of renown--Shelley,
Keats, or Tennyson--become playful, I confess to a feeling of
nervousness: the unpleasant, hot sensation you experience when a
distinguished man makes a fool of himself. Rossetti--I suppose from his
I