ls of the Slop and
Glucose school!

This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that
deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability,
this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of
Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in
our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the
kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks
of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting
out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and
sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first
contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less
than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the
sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly
burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again
with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to
meet the Skipper face to face.

Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to
invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so
closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes
is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own
noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And
how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob,
the smile which is not a grin.

A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD

Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on.

--EDWARD FITZGERALD.

I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the
Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill equipped to
do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take
up gladly. It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know
as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and
great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a
man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship. He
shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I
think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad
not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder
had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the
Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the
Suffolk lingo t