If I choose to write that great imaginative literature began in England with Archbishop Warham in the sixteenth century and ended with the death of Thomas Vaughan, the Silurist, in the first year of the eighteenth century, to come to life again with Joseph Conrad and the Yellow Book about 1892, and once more to disappear on the fourth of August, 1914--if I choose to write those extreme statements it is because I _want_ the Reader mentally to object to them the names of Swift, Keats, Thackeray, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith--or even those of Messrs. Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells and, say, Virginia Woolf. I _want_ the Lay Reader to make those mental reservations for himself. I should hate to be a professor, I should hate to be taken as dogmatizing, and I should still more hate that what dogmatizing I do perforce indulge in should be unquestioningly accepted by any poor victim. So that if I should say--as I probably shall--that, along with all his contemporaries, as a constructive artist even of the picaresque school, Dickens was contemptible, or if I say that Meredith as a stylist in comparison with Henry James was simply detestable, or that the conception of novel-writing as an art began for Anglo-Saxondom with Joseph Conrad, or that _Babbitt_ dealt a shrewder blow at the pre-war idealization of the industrial system and the idolatry of materialism than _Don Quixote_ at sixteenth-century vestiges of the chivalric spirit, or that _The Time of Man_ is the most beautiful individual piece of writing that has as yet come out of America, or that _The Lighthouse_ is the only piece of British--as opposed to English--writing that has latterly excited my craftsman’s mind--the only piece since the decline and death of Conrad ... if I commit myself to all these statements the reader must at once violently object that I am a log-roller writing up my personal friends--though I never knew, or even know anyone that knew, Miss Virginia Woolf. He must object that I have forgotten not only Trollope in my aspersions on mid-Victorian novelists, but that I have also forgotten Mr. George Moore. (Alas, I always forget Mr. George Moore, who is probably the greatest and most dispassionate technician that English Literature has ever seen.)