meditations of Obermann, and do not care in the least whether he got into a more or less maudlin frame of mind about things in general as contemplated from the Col de Janan. I shrink even from the admirable descriptions of Alpine scenery in the 'Modern Painters,' lest I should be launched unawares into ethical or æsthetical speculation. 'A plague of both your houses!' I wish to court entire absence of thought—not even to talk to a graceful gipsy scholar, troubled with aspirations for mysterious knowledge; but rather to the genuine article, such as the excellent Bamfylde Moore Carew, who took to be a gipsy in earnest, and was content to be a thorough loafer, not even a Bohemian in conscious revolt against society, but simply outside of the whole social framework, and accepting his position with as little reflection as some wild animal in a congenial country. Some kind philosopher professes to put my thoughts into correct phraseology by saying that for such a purpose I require thoroughly 'objective' treatment. I must, however, reject his suggestions, not only because 'objective' and 'subjective' are vile phrases, used for the most part to cover indolence and ambiguity of thought, but also because, if I understand the word rightly, it describes what I do not desire. The only thoroughly objective works with which I am acquainted are those of which Bradshaw's Railway Guide is an accepted type. There are occasions, I will admit, in which such literature is the best help to the imagination. When I read in prosaic black and white that by leaving Euston Square at 10 A.M. I shall reach Windermere at 5.45 P.M., it sometimes helps me to perform an imaginary journey to the lakes even better than a study of Wordsworth's poems. It seems to give a fixed point round which old fancies and memories can crystallise; to supply a useful guarantee that Grasmere and Rydal do in sober earnest belong to the world of realities, and are not mere parts of the decaying phantasmagoria of memory. And I was much pleased the other day to find a complimentary reference in a contemporary essayist to a lively work called, I believe, the 'Shepherd's Guide,' which once beguiled a leisure hour in a lonely inn, and which simply records the distinctive marks put upon the sheep of the district. The sheep, as it proved, was not a mere poetical figment in an idyll, but a real tangible animal, with wool capable of being tarred and ruddled, and eating real grass in real fells and accessible mountain dales. In our childhood, when any old broomstick will serve as well as the wondrous horse of brass On which the Tartar king did ride,