Mr. Pepys, in the
Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; and
even the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worth
returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so
admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all
atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now
comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries
including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worth
living!

I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King David
whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies
me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise
Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am
surprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its
splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are glorious
visions of truth at a white heat.

Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be a
picture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with no
great disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be
preserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I never
could quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as a
great philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never see
that Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for a
cultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weigh
the merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among the
first. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian's
Funeral"? Or "My Last Duchess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of
the passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived a better fable for a
poem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered for
us is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all the
philosophies of Wordsworth.

To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to their
power of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my own
faults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and of
raising me to a higher plane of toleration and of gaiety of heart.

As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson once applied to works
of fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followers
of this