n reading what the reviewers say. This
promise I hand on with the better confidence since it was endorsed for me
once in conversation by that eminently good man the late Henry Sidgwick;
who added, however, 'Perhaps I ought to make a single exception. There
was a critic who called one of my books "epoch-making." Being anonymous,
he would have been hard to find and thank, perhaps; but I ought to have
made the effort.'

May I follow up this experience of his with one of my own, as a preface
or brief apology for this lecture? Short-lived as is the author's joy in
his critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, mournful his consent
with Sir Thomas Browne that 'there is nothing immortal but immortality,'
he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of business, who in England call
themselves 'Press-Cutting Agencies,' in America 'Press-Clipping Bureaux,'
and, as each successive child of his invention comes to birth,
unbecomingly presume in him an almost virginal trepidation. 'Your book,'
they write falsely, 'is exciting much comment. May we collect and send
you notices of it appearing in the World's Press? We submit a specimen
cutting with our terms; and are, dear Sir,' etc.

Now, although steadily unresponsive to this wile, I am sometimes guilty
of taking the enclosed specimen review and thrusting it for preservation
among the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the book it was written to
appraise. So it happened that having this vacation, to dust--not to
read--a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, I happened on a
review signed by no smaller a man than Mr Gilbert Chesterton and
informing the world that the author of my obsolete book was full of good
stories as a kindly uncle, but had a careless or impatient way of
stopping short and leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted to
know: that, reaching the last chapter, or what he chose to make the last
chapter, instead of winding up and telling 'how everybody lived ever
after,' he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular knee with a blessing
and the remark that nine o'clock was striking and all good children
should be in their beds.

That criticism has haunted me during the vacation. Looking back on a
course of lectures which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting them in
print; revising them with all the nervousness of a beginner; I have
seemed to hear you complain--'He has exhorted us to write accurately,
appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold and es