Commerce is too often a dishonest selfish scramble: employers and employed are at variance when their interests are identical. Daily toil does not obliterate our taste for art, and is it not desirable that those who have the means to gratify that taste should be able to know the right and the wrong in it, and recognise noble art when they see it? Upon all this you have written much in your books, but if the books are not known, it is as if unwritten, of even worse, because it is needful work not doing the good it might do. Your 'Fors' series of letters are almost unknown to those to whom you have addressed them. I heard of them six months after their commencement, because some "able editor" was short of copy, and endeavoured to be clever at your expense. Sir, I hope you will reconsider this matter,--what possible harm could it do to simply announce the publication of a volume or a letter in a few newspapers or magazines? It is certainly a mistake that the knowledge of a newly-issued volume should depend upon the exigences of foolish editors or the popular relish for their highly-spiced rubbish. I hate anonymous letters, and you can have my address if you want it. I read the other day if any one dared to expostulate with you that you would gibbet him. What that means, I know not. Something awful, no doubt. So I merely subscribe myself, Sir, Your very humble servant, ------ FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XXII. Brantwood, 19th September, 1872. My Friends,-- I am to-day to begin explaining to you the meaning of my own books, which, some people will tell you, is an egotistical and impertinent thing for an author to do. My own view of the matter is, that it is generally more egotistical and impertinent to explain the meaning of other people's books,--which, nevertheless, at this day in England, many young and inexperienced persons are paid for pretending to do. What intents I have had, myself, therefore, in this 'Fors Clavigera,' and some other lately published writings, I will take on me to tell you, without more preamble. And first, for their little vignette stamp of roses on title-page. It is copied from the clearest bit of the pattern of the petticoat of Spring, where it is drawn tight over her thigh, in Sandro Botticelli's picture of her, at Florence. I drew it on the wood myself, and Mr. Burgess cut it; and it is on all my title-pages, because whatever I now write is meant to help in founding the society called of 'Monte Rosa;'--see page sixth of the seventeenth of these letters. Such reference hereafter, observe, is only thus printed, (XVII. 6).