No doubt some of the words flaunted by Smith are wrongly attributed to Browning. They are so wrongly attributed that anyone can see they are wrongly attributed. And any “sane, intelligent and decently responsible man” (to use Smith’s yellow press tautology) would have given me an opportunity of saying they are wrongly attributed before venturing to put on silly airs of hypercriticism. Then he would have learnt that the first and third line of the quotation belong oddly enough, to another piece of poetry, and have got mixed up with Browning’s stuff in some unaccountable way. I have not the least idea how the mix took place. All I know is that my article was finished off in great haste to catch the mail. It was sent in handscript and not typescript. And there was no time to send me a proof; otherwise the quotation would certainly have been corrected, and the many errors which now appear in my article would have disappeared. I feel I am justified in saying it was not my intention to send the words which have crept into print by the discovery that I have actually written down Browning’s very words. Here is Browning: And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me. The first line of the verse is missing. The three lines however serve the purpose of my comparison. I had also set down these lines by Browning: One lyric woman in her crocus vest, Woven of sea-wools. I intended to include this with my quotations. For here in my view is a figure as original and precisely felicitous as anything the Imagists have given us. That this dragging in of some wrongly attributed words—so obviously wrong as to deceive no one—for the sole purpose of discrediting an important article is dishonest, is clear from the fact that Smith does not drag in any other quotation from the many given, nor produce any other evidence whatsoever in support of his contention that my article is inept and careless throughout. In fact he has nothing more damaging to offer than his own fatuous statement that he happens “to consider my article an ill-digested congeries of vague views”; which, when one comes to examine it is found to contain a baseless assertion and a clear admission that my article is above and beyond Smith’s head. As to the silliness of Smith’s letter, this may be judged from the following: Smith begins with the generalization that magazines die “whose pages are as a rule careless, inconsidered and inept” (note the repetition and consequent lack of thoroughness). The publications of the capitalist press answer this description. The news sheets, for instance, are rotten with carelessness, inconsideredness and ineptness. They would be rottener if they could. Yet they do not die. On the contrary they sell by the million. If so, then THE LITTLE REVIEW should sell by the million. But Smith says it will die. And Smith is a careful, serviceable, and accurate man.