If Mr. Dennis Bradley is not at heart a man of letters, then I do not know the breed. From the very beginning, I divined the essential quality in him. I see him, in my mind’s eye, turning from the bundles of spring suitings, from the company of cloth merchants and cutters, into his sanctum to be alone with his art, or rather, his second and greater art, that of writing. There, I see him laboriously yet lovingly beating out phrase after phrase until each little essay is worthy of his great public. Lamb once said of a man that he would have been a tailor only he lacked the spirit. But think of how Lamb would have praised Mr. Bradley, who has the spirit to be not only an excellent tailor but a writer as well; and not, mark you, merely a tailor playing at authorship and trying to keep the needle and thread out of our sight, but an author and tailor at one and the same time, giving us, as it were, the literature and philosophy of shopkeeping and suit-making. This is to be a man of note, an originator, a force in letters. I fancy I can hear the unborn professors rustling their papers on ‘Bradley and His Age’ or ‘The Old Bond Street Circle.’ Being an original, Mr. Dennis Bradley cannot be fitted into any of our little pigeon-holes; he is not easily labelled; but as I have already spoken of his essays, we will keep the term and call him an essayist. His work, however, has had, and still has, so many phases that we shall do well to discriminate a little. There has been, for example, a change in his manner; and it has shown us, on the whole, a steady development, that advance towards the perfection of the instrument which marks the true artist. In his early work there was an irregularity, a wildness, a careless profusion, which promised much but hinted that the artist was not yet fully grown. He tried, if I remember rightly, to push his prose as near to poetry as it would go; and it was only later, when the thought became more weighty, that he turned to the quieter yet more impressive manner, the chiselled form and the pregnant phrase. During this early period, one of his favourite themes was Youth and Age; no new thing, it is true, but one to which he gave new significance by his characteristic treatment. When he exalted Youth and covered Age with ridicule, was he not interpreting the spirit of the times? One can discover, in that alone, the born man of letters. The times, disillusioned, were all for Youth, and he, divining it, stepped forth as our spokesman. Just because he happened to be also a tailor, just because young men happen to spend more on clothes than old men do, is no reason why Mr. Bradley should be robbed of his praise as a writer sensitive to our subtle changes of feeling.