as you do a precious shelf-full of the poets, cheap editions, entirely free from the blight of commentaries, foot-notes, and introductory biographies. And suppose these books in the course of years have become your religion, your guide, the source of your best thoughts and happiest moments--would you look on placidly while some one scrawled malicious truths between their lines? Oh, you would not. You would feel as I do. Think what the writers are to me, how I have built up their personalities entirely out of the materials they gave me in their work. They never told me horrid things about themselves. Their spirits, which alone they talked about, were serene and white. I knew Milton was blind, because he chose beautifully to tell me so. I knew he must have been an appreciative and regretful husband, because no husband who did not appreciate and regret would go so far as to talk of his deceased wife as his late espoused saint. I knew he was a tender friend, a friend capable of deepest love and sorrow, for in spite of Johnson's 'It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion,' I was convinced by the love and sorrow of 'Lycidas.' I knew he was a man whose spirit was dissolved continually into the highest ecstasies, who lived with all heaven before his eyes,--briefly, I said Amen to Wordsworth's 'His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.' And now a series of sordid little pictures rises up before me and chokes my Amen. I cannot bear to think of him having two or three olives for supper and a little cold water, and then being cross to his daughters. Of course he must be cross on such a supper. I can't conceive it kind to drill the daughters so strictly in languages they did not understand that they could read them aloud to him with extraordinary correctness. I shrink from the thought of the grumbling there was in that house of heavenly visions, grumbling and squabbling stamped out, it is true, by the heavy parental foot wherever noticed, but smouldering on from one occasion to the other. I cannot believe--I wish I could--that a child will dislike a parent without cause; the cause may be small things, a series of trifles each of little moment, snubs too often repeated, chills too often applied, stern looks, short words, sarcasms,--and these, as you and I both know, are quite ordinary dulnesses, often daily ingredients of family life; but they sit with a strange and upsetting grace on the poet of Paradise, and I would give anything never to have heard of them.