I am very much interested in your letter about Dickens.... [This was in the early stage of conversion.] Curiously enough I have lately been reading the whole of Macready’s Diary and was immensely interested in it. His conceit of course is colossal, but the diary struck me as affording a revelation of a real and virile creature of great independence of character, gifted on occasion with striking insight and vision. I was noticing as I read that Dickens was the only one of all his friends of long date with whom he never quarrelled, and it struck me that there must have been something innately fine and magnanimous in Dickens’ nature to command this constancy of friendship from a man so vain and irascible as Macready. But Macready sometimes sees far and I think his understanding of Browning and his appreciation of the poet’s inherent limitations in the field of drama are very illuminating. Evidently the drama was the goal of Browning’s ambition and yet it has always seemed to me--as it appeared to Macready--that he was not in essence a dramatist at all. When you next come to London you should look in at the Grafton Gallery and take a glance at the Post Impressionists. I saw most of them in Paris, with something added of further extravagance and crude indecency; but the Parisian critics, with few exceptions, took small account of the matter. Here, on the contrary, nearly all the younger critics are at their feet. It seems to me to indicate a wave of disease, even of absolute madness; for the whole product seems to breathe not ineptitude merely but corruption--especially marked in a sort of combined endeavour to degrade and discredit all forms of feminine beauty. Yours ever, JOE.” Later this was his great indictment of the Cubists also, well known to his friends in the Club. The following letter is to the same correspondent written during the last year of his life and in much more satisfied mood on the subject of his hero. HASTINGS, 1915. “MY DEAR,----