I have been looking into some of my books, now that the sea is so calm and the weather so enchantingly fair. I find a pleasurable contrast in dipping into such volumes as Boswell's "Johnson," Goldsmith's "Beau Nash," and Lady Montague's "Letters." The life they depict is so different, the opinions they express so dissimilar from those I have myself gradually grown to affect. And what an amazing _farrago_ is that same Boswell! Surely, if ever a book was written _con amore_, it is that one. Compare it with the "Life of Beau Nash." Each is the biography of a remarkable man, but what a difference! In every line Goldsmith displays a certain forced interest. I do not know, but I am almost positive he cared very little for his subject; I feel that the work is only being carried on for the sake of gain. Regarded so, it is a masterly little Life. Two hundred small pages--Nash merits no more on the roll of fame. But the former, twelve hundred closely printed pages. No paltry little anecdote or incident, germane or not, is too contemptible for him. The identity of some obscure school, the mastership of which Johnson never held, is argued about until one is weary of the thing. The illegible note, written for his own eye alone, is construed in a dozen ways, and judgment delivered as though the fate of empires hung thereon. The smug complaisance with which he cites some prayer or comment to illustrate his idol's religious orthodoxy would have angered me once--_did_ anger me once--but out here, on the broad blue ocean, I smile at the toady, and marvel at the wondrous thing he has wrought. Pleasant, too, to turn the leaves of my Dryden, and glance through some of those admirably composed prefaces, those egotistical self-criticisms so full of literary pugnacity, in an age when pluck in a poet needed searching for. I often say to folk who deplore Bernard Shaw's prefatory egotism that if they would read Dryden they would discover that Shaw is only up to his own masterly old game of imitating his predecessor's tactics. But Shaw is quite safe. He knows people do not read the literature of their own land nowadays. I had a laugh last evening all to myself when I noticed that, in a hasty re-arrangement of my book-shelves, _Gorky_ stood shouldering old _Chaucer_! Could disparity go further? And yet each is a master of his craft, each does his work with skill--with "trade finish," as we say. And so it seemed to me that, after all, one might leave the "Romaunt of the Rose" side by side with "Three of Them," on condition that each is read and re-read, if only for the workmanship.