“A Letter that Was Not Written,” again, is a comedy of the arts, relating to the threatened destruction of the Adelphi. “Books within Books” is a charming speculation on books written by characters in fiction, not the least desirable of which, surely, was “Poments: Being Poems of the Mood and the Moment”--a work that made a character in a forgotten novel deservedly famous. The next essay, “The Golden Drugget,” may seem by its subject--the beam of light that falls from an open inn-door on a dark night--to be outside the literary-and-artistic formula, but is it not essentially an argument with artists that the old themes are best--that this “golden drugget” of light would somehow make a better picture than Smithkins’ _Façade of the Waldorf Hotel by Night, in Peace Time_? Similarly, “Hosts and Guests,” though it takes us perilously near the borderland of lay humanity, is essentially a literary causerie. Mr. Beerbohm may write on hosts and describe the pangs of an impoverished host in one of the “more distinguished restaurants” as he waits and wonders what the amount of the bill will be; but the principal hosts and hostesses of whom he writes are Jael and Circe and Macbeth and Old Wardle. “A Point to be Remembered by Very Eminent Men,” the essay that follows, contains advice to great authors as to how they should receive a worshipper who is to meet them for the first time. The author should not, Mr. Beerbohm thinks, be in the room to receive him, but should keep him waiting a little, though not so long as Leigh Hunt kept young Coventry Patmore, who had been kicking his heels for two hours when his host appeared “rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long, ‘This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!’” There is no need to make the proof of the literary origins of “Max” more detailed. The world that he sees in the mirror of literature means more to Mr. Beerbohm than the world itself that is mirrored. The only human figure that attracts him greatly is the man who holds the mirror up. He does not look in his heart and write. He looks in the glass and writes. The parts of nature and art, as Landor gave them, will have to be reversed for Mr. Beerbohm’s epitaph. For him, indeed, nature seems hardly to exist. For him no birds sing, and he probably thinks that the scarlet pimpernel was invented by Baroness Orczy. His talent is urban and, in a good sense, prosaic. He has never ceased to be a dramatic critic, indeed, observing the men created by men (and the creators of those men) rather than the men created by God. He is a spectator, and a spectator inside four walls. He is, indeed, the last of the æsthetes. His æstheticism, however, is comic æstheticism. If he writes an unusual word, it is not to stir our imaginations with its beauty, but as a kind of dandyism, reminding us of the care with which he dresses his wit.