pointing. He thought, poor
fellow! that he had the world in his hand and the public at his feet;
whereas, the truth to tell, he had only the empire of a kind of back
garden and the lordship of (as Mr. Besant has told us) some forty
thousand out of a hundred millions of readers. You know that he suffered
greatly; you know too that to the last he worked and battled on as became
an honest, much-enduring, self-admiring man: as you know that in death he
snatched a kind of victory, and departed this life with dignity as one
'good at many things,' who had at last 'attained to be at rest.' You
know, in a word, that he took his part in the general struggle for
existence, and manfully did his best; and it is with something like a
pang that you find his biographer insisting on the merits of the feat,
and quoting approvingly the sentimentalists who gathered about his death-
bed. To make eloquence about heroism is not the way to breed heroes; and
it may be that Jefferies, had his last environment been less fluent and
sonorous, would now seem something more heroic than he does.

GAY

The Fabulist.

Gay the fabulist is only interesting in a certain sense and to a small
extent. The morality of the _Fables_ is commonplace; their workmanship
is only facile and agreeable; as literature--as achievements in a certain
order of art--they have a poor enough kind of existence. In comparison
to the work of La Fontaine they are the merest journalism. The
simplicity, the wit, the wisdom, the humanity, the dramatic imagination,
the capacity of dramatic expression, the exquisite union of sense and
manner, the faultless balance of matter and style, are qualities for
which in the Englishman you look in vain. You read, and you read not
only without enthusiasm but without interest. The verse is merely brisk
and fluent; the invention is common; the wit is not very witty; the
humour is artificial; the wisdom, the morality, the knowledge of life,
the science of character--if they exist at all it is but as anatomical
preparations or plants in a _hortus siccus_. Worse than anything, the
_Fables_ are monotonous. The manner is consistently uniform; the
invention has the level sameness of a Lincolnshire landscape; the
narrative moves with the equal pace of boats on a Dutch canal. The
effect is that of a host of flower-pots, the columns in a ledger, a
tragedy by the Rev. Mr. Home; and it is heightened by the matchless
triteness of the fa