are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical.
You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and
labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I
cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the
thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think."

Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically
averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald
not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an
opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of
the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the
thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can
see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others
would reach the same standard.

In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor
Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most
finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his
boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College.

He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his
advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that
give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in
prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he
says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one
side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be
sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a
medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose.

In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio
Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing
no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little
man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make his a
trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood
or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to
commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of
the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not
see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an
extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and
unexpected revelations of his own method of thought an