L. T. I wish I could share your enthusiasm, or that I could change places with you. Every year the personality of a new artist is revealed to you. I know you only pretend not to admire the modern school of painting. You find it a convenient pose. Your flora and your fauna are always receiving additions; while my garden is withered; my zoo is out of repair. The bars are broken; the tanks have run dry. There is hardly a trace of life except in the snake-house, and, as I mentioned, the last giraffe is dead. L. C. Our friend, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, is fortunately able to give us a different account of the institution in Regent's Park. You are quite wrong about modern painting. None of the younger men can paint at all. A few of them can draw, I admit. It is all they can do. The death of Charles Furse blasted all my hopes of English art. Whistler is dead; Sargent is an American. L. T. Well, so is Henry James, if it comes to that. And so _was_ Whistler. But I have seen the works of several young artists who I understand are carrying out the great traditions of painting. Ricketts, Shannon, Wilson Steer, Rothenstein, Orpen, Nicholson, Augustus John are surely worthy successors to Turner, Alfred Stevens, and the Pre-Raphaelites. L. C. They are merely connoisseurs gifted with expressing their appreciation of the past in paint. They appeal to you as a literary man. You like to detect in every stroke of their brushes an echo of the past. Their pictures have been _heard_, not _seen_. All the younger artists are committing burglary on the old masters. L. T. It is you who are a disappointed optimist. L. C. Not about literature or the drama. I seem to hear, with Ibsen's 'Master Builder,' the younger generation knocking at the door. L. T. It comes in without knocking in my experience; and generally has _fig_-leaves in its hair--a decided advance on the coiffure of Hedda Gabler's lover. L. C. But look at Bernard Shaw. L. T. Why should I look at Bernard Shaw? I read his plays and am more than ever convinced that he has gone on the wrong lines. His was the opportunity. He made _il gran refuto_. Some one said that George Saintsbury never got over the first night of _Hernani_. Shaw never recovered the _premiere_ of _Ghosts_. He roofed our Thespian temple with Irish slate. His disciples found English drama solid brick and leave it plaster of Paris. Yet Shaw might have been another Congreve. L. C. _Troja fuit_. We do not want another. I am sure you never went to the Court at all.