And this reflection reminds me of an incident related to me by Sala. He told it of James Hannay. That accomplished writer was a great admirer of the works of Horace, and on December 8—the poet’s birthday—he gave a dinner in honour of his favourite author. At these annual assemblies the majority of the guests were men having a scholarly acquaintance with the writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. On one of these anniversaries it happened that the scholarly persons were all prevented from attending, and Hannay found himself surrounded at dinner by friends whose knowledge of Horace, if anything at all, was of a schoolboy and negligible kind. It was Hannay’s custom on these occasions to propose one toast—“The Memory of Horace.” He rose to make his customary address, which he brought to a conclusion in the following words: “Would that the great poet were with us now! Here he would tell us of his Venusian home under the shadow of the Apulian Hills; here he would explain the recondite personal allusions in his ‘Satires’; here he would lift the veil from his inner life in quoting passages from the ‘Epistles’; here he would recite, as only he could, his lighter or his graver ‘Odes,’ happily conscious of the fact that not one person in his hearing understood a word of the language in which he was speaking!” And, according to Sala, no one resented the pleasantry. It may be assumed that Hannay was more exercised about the memory of Horace than he was about his own. One never hears him quoted now; yet he established a claim on the memory of posterity far more valid than that of a score of writers who have become accepted as speaking with authority. His “Satire and Satirists” proves him to be as fine a master of satire as many of those with whom he deals. His “Singleton Fontenoy” is full of wit and humour, and the shrewd wisdom of a thorough man of the world. He wrote largely in the _Quarterly Review_, was a contributor to _Punch_, and a regular writer on the Press. There is no English critic to whose pages I revert with keener satisfaction; but that taste is not general. Hannay, alas! has written his name in water.