line is blurred and
blunted; in a few months they have melted away and run down the
gutters. So much for historical work.

Then there comes the question of editorial work: and here again I have
the greatest admiration for men like Dr. Birkbeck Hill or Professor
Masson, who will devote a lifetime to patiently amassing all the facts
that can be gleaned about some great personality. But this again
requires a mind of a certain order, and there is no greater mistake in
literary work than to misjudge the quality and force of one's mind.

My own work, I am certain, must be of a literary kind; and when one
goes a little further back and asks oneself what it is that makes great
personalities, like Milton or Dr. Johnson, worth spending all this
labour about, why one cares to know about their changes of lodgings and
their petty disbursements, it is, after all, because they are great
personalities, and have displayed their greatness in imaginative
writings or in uttering fertile and inspiring conversational dicta.
Imagine what one's responsibility would have been if one could have
persuaded Charles Lamb to have taken up the task of editing the works
of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to have deserted his ephemeral
contributions to literature. Or if one could have induced Shelley to
give up writing his wild lyrics, and devote himself to composing a work
on Political Justice. Jowett, who had a great fancy for imposing
uncongenial tasks on his friends, is recorded to have said that
Swinburne was a very brilliant, young man but that he would never do
anything till he had given up wasting his time in poetry. Imagine the
result if Jowett had had his way!

Of course, it all depends upon what one desires to achieve and the sort
of success one sets before oneself. If one is enamoured of academical
posts or honorary degrees, why, one must devote oneself to research and
be content to be read by specialists. That is a legitimate and even
admirable ambition--admirable all the more because it brings a man a
slender reputation and very little of the wealth which the popular
writer hauls in.

The things which live in literature, the books which make a man worth
editing a century or two after he is dead, are, after all, the creative
and imaginative books. It is not in the hope of being edited that
imaginative authors write. Milton did not compose _L'Allegro_ in the
spirit of desiring that it might be admirably annotated by a Scotch
professor. Keats