In order to get together this little heap of his—and with all his industry it is not a very crushing heap—of mistakes and pseudo-mistakes, Mr. Gomme has resorted to the oddest expedients. He pretends to be unaware that there has been any revision whatever of _The Outline of History_. He has taken the first unrevised part issue as if it were the latest text, and he has avoided any comparison with the later book edition. This may be mere laziness or the mental slovenliness that makes one edition seem as good as another to an ill-trained mind. But it does enable Mr. Gomme to swell out his list of charges with perhaps a dozen little things that stand corrected in the current edition. And, in addition, it gives him the extra illustrations with which the part issue was adorned by the publisher. He is either so ignorant as to think, or so warped by the spirit of controversy as to pretend to think, that I am responsible for these extra illustrations, that I have chosen them myself and written the inscriptions underneath them. With these extra illustrations, and very good illustrations they are for the most part though they have no place in the definite edition now before the public, and with the occasionally rather gaudy covers Messrs. Newnes used, he makes great play in his earnest endeavour to pile up a case for inaccuracy against me. Why he does not go on to suppose I wrote the advertisements of infant foods and condiments that brightened the cover-backs and treat these too as an integral part of _The Outline of History_ and comment on the gross materialism that inspired them, I am at a loss to imagine. I must suppose that God has set limits even to the mental possibilities of Mr. Gomme. Or possibly Mr. Gomme overlooked this controversial opportunity. There is a quality in Mr. Gomme’s manner of attack on these extra illustrations that makes me feel a curious sympathy with the brighter members of his Greek classes at Glasgow. “Some of the illustrations are queerly chosen,” he remarks. He notes my comment inserted at the eleventh hour on one unavoidable picture. “This is a photograph of a model restoration of Solomon’s temple. It is a very exaggerated and glorified restoration. The only justifiable thing in it is the central temple. All the splendid galleries round it are _imaginary_. The true walls were probably rough piled stone.” He can quote this and never recognise the tale it tells so plainly. “Then why,” he asks with real or affected imbecility, “does he give it?” To which I suppose the only possible answer is to say, with a dreadful calm, “I didn’t give it.” One illustration after another is assailed in much the same manner, with the same dense disregard of the manifest facts of the case. I am even blamed because an earthquake has damaged one of the temples shown, and to crown all, the legend put to one of the coloured plates by one of Messrs. Newnes’ staff is quoted as a sample of the “affected simplicity” of my style.