If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much laughter as well as language in _Intentions_ that I am inclined to agree with Mr. Ransome that _Intentions_ is "that one of Wilde's books that most nearly represents him." Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on taking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that "his paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths." How horrified Wilde would have been to hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths--or a good deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome's attitude on the question of Wilde's sincerity seems to me as impossible as his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which every great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into that. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome's conclusions, we must be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century. XVIII.--TWO ENGLISH CRITICS (1) MR. SAINTSBURY Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. His _Peace of the Augustans_ is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth century. His enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them. He does not merely remind us of the genius of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons us to Armory's _John Buncle_ and to the Reverend Richard Graves's _Spiritual Quixote_ as to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that "for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous, _The Spiritual Quixote_ may, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four themselves." That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered through _The Peace of the Augustans_. After reading the book, one can scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young's _Night Thoughts_ and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to Shakespeare himself--Prior who, "with the eternal and almost unnecessary exception of Shakespeare ... is about the first to bring out the true English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own laughter"--Prior, of whom it is further written that "no one, except Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of _Ecclesiastes_." It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it