"Don't lend me any sad stories--no, not if they are masterpieces. I cannot afford to be made unhappy, and I suspect that book 'Anna Karenina'--I suspect it is Russian, and if it is I know what to expect, and I couldn't bear it. There would be a beautiful woman in it--all that is best in a woman, and she would be miserable and love some trumpery frip (as they do) and die of finding out she had been a fool--and it would be beautifully written and full of nature and just like life, and I couldn't bear it. These books are written for the hard-hearted, to melt them into a softer mood for once before they congeal again--as much music is written--not for poets but for stockjobbers, to wring iron tears from them for once; that is the use of sorrowful art, to penetrate the thick hide of the obtuse, and I have grown to be a coward about pain. I should like that Anna so much and be so sorry for her and wish I had been the man instead of that thing she would have--and it wouldn't be happy. Look! tells me it ends well and that the two lovers marry and are happy ever afterwards, and I'll read it gratefully--and I shall wait your answer." TWO TRIALS [Sidenote: _Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones_] Whilst the Commission was sitting he went once or twice with Sir George Lewis to the Law Courts and closely listened and watched, sitting where he could see the face of Mr. Parnell clearly. "Charles Stewart Parnell," he once said, "God only knows what he really was, but I saw him in court and watched him the day long: he was like Christ." Of the miserable Pigott, the perjured witness against Parnell, he wrote: "And I have grown philosophical--it came of seeing Pigott in the witness-box, who looked like half the dreary men one meets, and I don't see why the rest of the Pigotts shouldn't be found out too. So it made me reflect on crime and its connection with being found out and made me philosophical and depressed." But on another day his mind turned to a more cheerful exercise: "Legal testimony doesn't affect me at all, and I want people tried for their faces--so I spent the time in court settling things all my own way, and I tried the Judges first and acquitted one, so that he sits in court without a blemish on his character; and one I admitted to mercy, and of the other have postponed the trial for further evidence: and then I tried the counsel on both sides, and one of them I am sorry to say will have to be hanged for his face." THE FOUR HISTORIANS [Sidenote: _Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones_] On hearing some one quote Carlyle's contempt for invented stories and his saying that facts were better worth writing of, Edward exclaimed: "'Frederick the Great's' a romance; 'Monte Cristo' is real history, and so is 'The Three Musketeers.'" And another time he said: "Ah, the historians are so few. There's Dumas, there's Scott, there's Thackeray, and there's Dickens, and no more--after you have said them, there's an end."