Think of it, Rudyard! think of it! Art ready to cope with Phill? Wilt meet Potts on his own ground? Deem not thyself Eden's superior, for he "understands," according to the _Athenæum_, "proportion, contrast, balance, and the value of unhalting movement," things that inferior persons like Scott, Thackeray, Balzac, and others had to study all their lives long. Moreover, another journal dictatorially announces that "novel-readers must prepare to welcome" Phillpotts. Mark that "must"! That "must" would fain seize the Ass-public by the throat, and make it eat Phillpotts like a turnip. But the Ass is a fastidious ass sometimes--it likes to nose its food before devouring; it will nose Phillpotts at its pleasure. Meantime, it is nosing thee, friend Kipling, dubiously and with a faint touch of derision. Ridicule kills; beware of it, my boy. And to avoid ridicule and secure dignity, hist!--a side-whisper, meant kindly--_Put down your Boom business!_ Stamp it out. Hush it up. If you don't take my advice you'll regret it. The thing has been over-done. You have had more friends than are good for you; a few stanch foes would have brought you much more benefit in the long run. When your ill-advised flatterers quote your jingly "Barrack-Room Ballads" as though they were things immortal--when good Frank Harris, of _Fortnightly_ prowess, imposes a growling recital of scraps of your doggerel, "Fuzzy-wuz," on patiently-bored people sitting at a social meal, with the air of one considering it a finer production than "The Isles of Greece," or Shelley's "Cloud"--we say with Hamlet, "Somewhat too much of this." In the year of grace 1900 "Barrack-Boom Ballads" will have gone the way of all "occasional verse," and not a line will remain in the memory of the public. The English people know perfectly well what poetry is, and no critic will ever persuade them that you can write it. At the same time no one wishes to deny your surface cleverness or your literary ability. You are on the same rank with Bret Harte, Frank Harris, Frank Stockton, Anstey, and a host of others, and there is no objection taken to your standing along with these; but there is objection, honest objection, made to your being forced higher aloft than your compeers, by means of a ridiculously exaggerated, aggressively ubiquitous "boom." When Walter of the _Times_ rushed frantically into a court of law about his copyright in a Kipling article (he having taken no such heed of any other author's article till then), the outside public laughed and shrugged their shoulders at the absurdity of the thing. From the fuss made, one would have imagined that God Himself read the _Times_ every morning, and was particularly interested in Kipling. This sort of nonsense never lasts. The reaction infallibly sets in. Never was a name sent up sky-high like a rocket, but it did not fall plump down like a stick. And so, excellent Rudyard, beware! You are not "the greatest English author" by a long way.