DEAR JACK,--Invincible epistolary laziness and a conscience humbled to the dust have conspired to retard this letter. God sent me straight to you with my story about Bergson's cablegram--the only other person to whom I have told it was Henry Higginson. _One_ of you must have put it into the Boston "Journal" of the next day,--_you_ of course, to humiliate me still the more,--so now I lie in the dust, spurning all the decorations and honors under which the powers and principalities are trying to bury me, and seeking to manifest the naked truth in my uncomely form. Never again, never again! Naked came I into life, and this world's vanities are not for me! You, dear Jack, are the only reincarnation of Isaiah and Job, and I praise God that he has let me live in your day. _Real_ values are known only to _you_! As for Bergson, I think your change of the word "comic" into the word "tragic" throughout his book is _impayable_, and I have no doubt it is true. I have only read half of him, so don't know how he is coming out. Meanwhile send me your own foolishness on the same subject, commend me to your liege lady, and believe me, shamefully yours, W. J. _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _Feb._ 8, 1910. DEAR JACK,--Wonderful! wonderful! Shallow, incoherent, obnoxious to its own criticism of Chesterton and Shaw, off its balance, accidental, whimsical, false; but with central fires of truth "blazing fuliginous mid murkiest confusion," telling the reader nothing of the Comic except that it's smaller than the Tragic, but _readable_ and splendid, showing that the _man who wrote it_ is more than anything he can write! Pray patch some kind of a finale to it and send it to the "Atlantic"! Yours ever fondly, W. J. (Membre de I'Institut!) * * * * * The "specimen" which was enclosed with the following note has been lost. It was perhaps a bit of adulatory verse. What is said about "Harris and Shakespeare," as also in a later letter to Mr. T. S. Perry on the same subject, was written apropos of a book entitled "The Man Shakespeare, His Tragic Life-Story."[87] _To John Jay Chapman._ Cambridge, _Feb._ 15, 1910. DEAR JACK,--Just a word to say that it pleases me to hear you write this about Harris and Shakespeare. H. is surely false in much that he claims; yet 'tis the only way in which Shakespeare ought to be handled, so his _is_ the best book. The trouble with S. was his intolerable fluency. He improvised so easily that it kept down his level. It is hard to see how the man that wrote his best things could possibly have let himself do ranting bombast and complication on such a large scale elsewhere. 'T is mighty fun to read him through in order. I send you a specimen of the kind of thing that tends to hang upon me as the ivy on the oak. When will the day come? Never till, like me, you give yourself out as a poetry-hater. Thine ever, [Illustration: signature my new signature] _To Dickinson S. Miller._