Butler.
His singular merits were discovered by others who had no more than
heard of him, but found he was exactly what they wanted. If his volume
of _Note Books_ is not the best example of its sort we have, then I
should be glad to learn the name of the best. This Lent I tried
Coleridge again. But surely one's mind must be curiously at random to
go to such woolgathering. I found him what I fear Lamb and his friends
knew him to be--a tireless and heavy preacher through the murk of whose
nebulous scholarship and philosophy the revealing gleams of wisdom are
so rare that you are almost too weary to open the eyes to them when
they flash. Selden is better, but abstract, legal, and dry.

Hazlitt compelled a renewal of an old respect; his humanity, his
instinct for essentials, his cool detection of pretence and cant,
however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for the
embodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the clear,
hard, bright, vigorous weather of the downs when the wind is
up-Channel. It is bracing. But I discovered another notebook, of which
I have heard so little that it shows what good things may be lost in
war; for this book was published in 1914. It is the _Impressions and
Comments_ of Havelock Ellis. There have been in the past critics of
life and the things men do who have been observers as acute, as
well-equipped in knowledge, and have had a command of English as free
and accurate, as the author of "Impressions and Comments"; but not
many. Yet such judgments of men, their affairs and their circumstances,
could have been written in no other time than the years just before the
war--the first note is dated July, 1912. The reflections are often
chill and exposed; but so is a faithful mirror bleak, though polished
and gleaming, when held up to grey affairs in the light of a day which
is ominous. You seem to feel in this book the cold draught moving
before the storm which has not come--the author knew of no storm to
come, and does not even hint at it; but the portents, and the look of
the minds of his fellows, make him feel uncomfortable, and he asks what
ails us. Now we know. It is strange that a book so wise and enlivening,
whether it is picturing the Cornish coast in spring, the weakness of
peace propaganda, Bianca Stella, Rabelais, the Rules of Art, the Bayeux
Tapestry, or Spanish cathedrals, should have been mislaid and
forgotten....

The fire is dying. It is grey, fallen, and