I have sometimes, perhaps rashly, during the writing of this book wondered "What next"? By luck for myself--whether also for my readers it would be ill even to wonder--I have been permitted to execute all the literary schemes I ever formed, save two. The first of these (omitting a work on "Transubstantiation" which I planned at the age of thirteen but did not carry far) was a _History of the English Scholastics_, which I thought of some ten years later, which was not unfavoured by good authority, and which I should certainly have attempted, if other people at Oxford in my time had not been so much cleverer than myself that I could not get a fellowship. It has, strangely enough, never been done yet by anybody; it would be a useful corrective to the exoteric chatter which has sometimes recently gone by the name of philosophy; and perhaps it might shake Signor Benedetto Croce (whom it is hardly necessary to say I do _not_ include among the "chatterers") in his opinion that though, as he once too kindly said, I am a _valente letterato_, I am sadly _digiuno di filosofia_.[6] But it is "too late a week" for this. And I have lost my library. Then there was a _History of Wine_, which was actually commissioned, planned, and begun just before I was appointed to my Chair at Edinburgh, and which I gave up, not from any personal pusillanimity or loss of interest in the subject, but partly because I had too much else to do, and because I thought it unfair to expose that respectable institution to the venom of the most unscrupulous of all fanatics--those of teetotalism. I could take this up with pleasure: but I have lost my cellar. What I should really like to do would be to translate _in extenso_ Dr. Sommer's re-edition of the Vulgate Arthuriad. But I should probably die before I had done half of it; no publisher would undertake the risk of it; and if any did, "Dora," reluctant to die, would no doubt put us both in 'prison for using so much paper. Therefore I had better be content with the divine suggestion, and not spoil it by my human failure to execute. And so I may say, for good, _Valete_ to the public, abandoning the rest of the leave-taking to their discretion.[7] GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH, _Christmas_, 1918. FOOTNOTES: [1] It is perhaps worth while to observe that I did not "edit" this, and that I had nothing whatever to do with any part of it except the _Introduction_ and my earlier translation of the _Chronique de Charles IX_, which was, I believe, reprinted in it. [2] In very great strictness an exception should perhaps be made for notice of him, and of some others, in _The Later Nineteenth Century_ (Edinburgh and London, 1907).