its own. But what
one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great
flood of humanity like Scott, or with a leaping cataract of
irrepressible humour like Dickens, or with a core of white-hot passion
like Charlotte Bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and
zest, such as Stevenson showed.

Well, we must wait and hope. Meanwhile I will write to my great
book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who
has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a
line. I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright
volumes shall be packed for you. The one condition is that you shall
write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. The only thing is
to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is
mere sheep-like grazing--forty feeding like one.--Ever yours,

T. B.

ASHFIELD,
SETTLE,
Sept. 4, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading FitzGerald's pretty essay Euphranor.
It is Platonic both in form and treatment, but I never feel that it is
wholly successful. Most of the people who express admiration for it
know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a
draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the
twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of
Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However,
it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage
from Digby's Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets
out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the
young] are easily put to Shame" (so runs the script), "for they have no
resources to set aside the precepts which they have learned; and they
have lofty souls, for they have never been disgraced or brought low,
and they are unacquainted with Necessity; they prefer Honour to
Advantage, Virtue to Expediency; for they live by Affection rather than
by Reason, and Reason is concerned with Expediency, but Affection with
Honour."

All very beautiful and noble, no doubt; but is it real? was I, were
you, creatures of this make? Could these fine things have been
truthfully said of us? Perhaps you may think it of yourself, but I can
only regretfully say that I do not recognise it.

My boyhood and youth were, it seems to me, very faulty things. My age
is faulty still, more's the pity. But without any vain conceit, and
with all