Now that the _Literary Supplement_ costs 6_d._, one feels entitled to examine one’s relation to it with a certain sense of solemnity. But I well know what mine is, before examination. Even when it cost 3_d._, my relation to it was always one of weekly disconcertment. It revealed to me so many things I didn’t know and never should know, yet known presumably to some other reader. Now omniscience is derided as a “foible,” but why should one be ashamed to confess it as an ideal? Frankly, I envy the man who was so various that he seemed to be not one but all mankind’s epitome. He must have got more fun out of life than your profound specialist. It is to give this various reader this variety of fun that (I surmise, but the editor will know for certain) the _Supplement_ exists. But for me, imperfectly various, it means something bordering on despair. I suppose other readers are more sensible, and just take what suits them, leaving the rest. But I simply hate leaving anything. Take the ten columns modestly headed “New Books and Reprints.” What a world of unknown topics and alien ideas and unfathomable theories about everything this simple title covers! Is there any reader whose intellectual equipment includes at once the biography of Absalom Watkin, of Manchester, the Indian Trade Inquiry Reports on Hides and Skins, an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and the particular philosophy of mysticism entertained by Mr. Watkin (not Absalom, but another)? Mine doesn’t—and there’s the pang, for each and all these subjects, simply because they are there, staring me in the face, the face of an absolutely blank mind about them, excite my intellectual curiosity. I should like to know all about ergatocracy—merely on the strength of its alluring name—and the true story, from the Franciscan point of view, of the Franciscans and the Protestant Revolution in England, and Lord Grey’s reminiscences of intercourse with Mr. Roosevelt, and the history of the Assyrian “millet” in the great war, and what is meant by the “Free Catholic” tendency in the Nonconformist Churches. Yet it is fairly certain that I shall have to do without any knowledge of most, if not all, of these matters which presumably engage the enlightened interest of some other readers.