But gifts that help an advocate, may be a hindrance to an author. It does sometimes happen that a reviewer knows no more about a subject than he could gather from the book he is reviewing. An author collects materials till he is bewildered--“cannot see the wood for the trees”--and he makes a bulky book, putting all this material in, but doing nothing to clear the subject up. And the reviewer will praise him for his wealth of learning, and will say he has done all that is humanly possible towards the solution of a problem that really is insoluble. Another author sifts the materials and solves the problem. He makes a much smaller book, putting in nothing that is not essential, and stating his conclusions so effectively that they command assent. And the reviewer will dismiss it as a book of platitudes, which tells you nothing that is not obvious to the meanest comprehension.--These, of course, are extreme cases; but the reviewer often fails to see that mere pomposity is not a guarantee of solid learning, and that frivolity need not mean shallowness. There was an essay, _The critic as artist_, written by Wilde in 1891, and full of epigram and paradox; and the reviewers were so dazzled by his flippancy that hardly any of them saw how much sound sense there was beneath it all. A good judge told me that he considered it the best thing of its kind since Plato. A friend of mine in the same house at Harrow went up to Oxford at the same time that I went up to Cambridge, October 1876. He came over to see me at Trinity, and I went over to see him at Magdalen. (It made me wish that I had gone there too.) On the Sunday evening the Lessons were read by one of the Demies. His reading was dramatically good, but his appearance was astonishing, with his long hair hanging down upon his surplice. I asked who on earth he was, and was told he was a man named Wilde, who could be awfully amusing, but dressed just like a guy. I never made his acquaintance; but, having once seen him, I knew him by sight for evermore. The last time I saw him was in September 1897. I was at Naples, and he was staying in the same hotel--under an assumed name. My father was never a collector, but would sometimes buy a thing he liked. My grandfather did not approve, and used to write him letters about it, thus, 27 May 1855, “I should say your money might be more advantageously employed than with coins and pictures.” When my grandfather was eighty and my father fifty, this lecturing still went on: 27 July 1869, “You may say No business of mine. I am your father.” It was my turn next. I had a little money when I came of age, and I had a wish to buy a picture by Burne Jones, _Laus Veneris_. My elders looked askance, and talked about Consols; but I should have made a very much better investment than Consols, had I bought that picture then and sold it some years afterwards.