His overflow on such matters is meanwhile amusing enough as mere spirits and sport—interesting as it would yet be to catch as we might, at different moments, the congruity between the manner of his feeling a fable in the germ and that of his afterwards handling it. There are passages again and again that light strikingly what I should call his general conscious method in this relation, were I not more tempted to call it his conscious—for that is what it seems to come to—negation of method. A whole delightful letter—to Mr. Colvin, February 1, 1892—is a vivid type. (This letter, I may mention, is independently notable for the drollery of its allusion to a sense of scandal—of all things in the world—excited in some editorial breast by “The Beach of Falesà;” which leads him to the highly pertinent remark that “this is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in it at all.” Then he remembers he had “The Treasure of Franchard” refused as unfit for a family magazine and feels—as well he may—“despair weigh upon his wrists.” The despair haunts him and comes out on another occasion. “Five more chapters of David. . . . All love affair; seems pretty good to me. Will it do for the young person? I don’t know: since the Beach, I know nothing except that men are fools and hypocrites, and I know less of them than I was fond enough to fancy.”) Always a part of his physiognomy is the play, so particularly salient, of his moral fluctuations, the way his spirits are upset by his melancholy and his grand conclusions by his rueful doubts.