I do not, however, dwell at any length on either Smollett or Marryat because, great as for me they seem, they still remain individual figures leaving very little trace on the traditions of English literature--and that indeed was the case with Fenimore Cooper who was one of the most beautiful pure stylists that the English language has yet excited into writing. There is in _The Two Admirals_ a passage descriptive of mists rising from the sails and cordage of battleships as seen from the turf of cliff-tops at dawn, that remains for me one of the incomparable passages in the language. And, whilst I am about the matter of pure style, I may as well explain here why lately I mentioned that I was then writing in Lisbon harbour. That apparently egotistic excrescence was due to the fact that I liked to remember that--no, not Fielding--but Beckford once lay in Lisbon harbour and wrote most beautiful prose there. Beckford is known only as the author of _Vathek_, which is, to be sure, most remarkable as a _tour de force_--and which is usually bound up with _Rasselas_ in popular reprints; but he is also the author of _Letters from Portugal_ which might almost be regarded as a novel, such an admirable autobiographical portrait do they give of their writer in his adventurous progress from the city of Camoens and Vasco da Gama to the monastery of Batalha. Prose, I suppose, is to some extent the business of a writer on the English Novel, so I suppose I may be pardoned my digression about Beckford and make the note that if I wanted to put together a small, exquisitely pleasing fascicule of admirable because simple English prose I should take a passage from the suppressed Preface to the Bible, a passage from Henry V’s address to his soldiers before Agincourt, one from Clarendon, one from _Gulliver_, one from Johnson’s _Life of Drake_, the passage from Cooper that I have mentioned above, and one from the _Letters from Portugal_, one from Maine’s _Ancient Law_--and then one from any book of W. H. Hudson. The English language is not very distinguished for its prose, but that would make a very admirable little volume! One might almost add the opening description of the village from White’s _Selborne_.