It is the fate of the once-born to become pessimistic as they grow old, as it is privilege of the twice-born to increase in hope as they wax in youth. One of our Cocoonists, therefore, must be prematurely old in the former sense, since he lifts up his lamentation that “the beauty of English prose is already mainly a thing of the past.” It is not a sentiment for “the nursery of the nation,” and it is altogether untrue. Beautiful English prose has certainly been written, but the best is yet to be. Beautiful qualities of English prose we have certainly had revealed to us in abundance, and some of our greatest writers have succeeded in making an anthology in their style of two or three or even four of them; but an English prose with all its known qualities harmonised and synthesised in a single style is a thing of the future and not of the past. There are qualities in English still unrevealed. A great deal of “energy,” however, will be necessary to such a synthesis. Its creator must be not only twice-born, but, as the _Mahabharata_ says of Indian sages, “blazing with spiritual energy,” for the fire of imagination to fuse all the qualities of English prose into a style is too intense for ordinary mortals. AN OXFORD MISCELLANY.—_A Queen’s College Miscellany_ is filially dedicated to Walter Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, it seems, were Queen’s men in their day. Still another association with these writers is sought in the comparison of the college coterie from which each arose with the group responsible for the present miscellany. Something of the nature of a cult is indicated; and I take it that the various items of the miscellany are “corporate” as well as individual. The foreword says as much. In a vocabulary that seems most ominous for literature, we are referred to a “literary team” whose “output” is here presented, and to an attempt to “prove that team-work is possible in prose and poetry.” And the miscellany is the first “harvest” of “the refined product.” My opinion of “team-work” is certainly that it is possible both in prose and poetry. No individual has ever by himself written either great prose or great poetry, and the greatest literary works of the world, not excepting Shakespeare, are of anonymous—that is to say, of collective—authorship. The elevation of the group-consciousness, however, is everything, and I need not remark that a group whose highest aim is to emulate Pater and Dowson, and whose considered “foreword” contains such terminological ineptitudes as “team-work,” “output,” and the “harvest” of a “refined product,” is not yet upon a very high plane of discourse.