When you write and ask me to tell you what books I read during my illness I can see an ancient accusation of yours peering at me behind the question--as though you had visibly added that, except when indisposed, I never read books at all. And if it weren't that I too find other people's reading so interesting, though less informing perhaps than their pictures, I might possibly stand upon my dignity, and decline to supply you with an answer. And in any case, now that I come to reflect a little, this will be rather a difficult thing to do. For having got me at a disadvantage, you see, I could no longer pick and choose, as is my wont when the health within me is rude and exacting. I could no longer demand haughtily of a book that it must make me read it, or remain within its covers for ever unread. My defences were down, and I had perforce to roll over, hands up, for anything in the shape of book with which Accident and Mudie had happened to endow my house. And as a result I read half a dozen novels that, as the Americans say, left me cold, although I must needs give them the credit of having whiled away the time. Moreover, before dismissing them thus unkindly, I must remember that they were each the work of somebody's hand and brain, and the hard work too--at any rate so far as the hand was concerned--as anyone who has tried to put eighty thousand words of even unimaginative English upon paper would surely bear witness. Some of it too, one could see, was the rather tired work of minds that should really have been (perhaps only too willingly) lying fallow of production. And I think that I noticed this particularly in an altogether unimportant little volume called "Daisy's Aunt" by Mr. E. F. Benson, that may well stand for a sorrowful example. It's true that it was merely a two-shilling story; but even so, it was surely an unworthy one. And yet, I suppose, there _is_ a public that likes to devour these descriptions of very ordinary London drawing-rooms and very usual Thames-side bungalows--that would fain listen to even the weariest repetitions of the somewhat annoying slang of the "oh you heavenly person" type that for the moment is being affected by Mr. Benson's "quite nice people." And having thus found, or created, such a public, and designed the precise bait that it requires, I suppose that one is justified in hooking, as often as may be, one's share of their two-shilling pieces. But alas for the artist in Mr. Benson, in whose books there have been passages good enough of their kind to have made, perhaps, three or four pieces of real literature that few, I suppose, would have bought, but that some, at any rate, would have liked to keep upon their shelves. And yet again, who is to say that Mr. Benson (as representing not a few) has not after all chosen his better way? For if his popularity has been costly, it is at any rate of a clean and healthy sort, and one that may well, perhaps, be