ou cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the
worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities
behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature,
would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology"
that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may
have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of
a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the
whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that
he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically
proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could
recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to
cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap
wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we
patch up things."

Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal,
will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on
which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary
interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's
work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute.

He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of
absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it.
Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more,
discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the
ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries:
oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more
elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and
self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in
exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many
a day by cultured readers and thinkers.

Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique
place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and
because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the
eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of
enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does
in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques
Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of
the "Contrat Soc