Evidently lovely Marie Henrietta did not sense the leanness of the long, thin years. Nor the New World that was coming. A most satisfying and illuminating writer upon art is the Spaniard, Ballesteros de Martos. His _Artistas Españoles Contemporaneos_ is a gem of its kind. It is splendidly illustrated. There is some quality in the prose of De Martos which recalls to my mind the great sculptors of his country who work direct from life in hard stone. It is economy; some unusual direct, swift power of expression. He is not only art critic but novelist and editor. One of his late novels is _Luz en el Camino_. He was one of the editors of that brilliant Spanish review, _Cervantes_. I like this from Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_: “The images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking actions and opinions in succeeding ages.” Charm can come again, even in this dull day! It must be born, however, of brilliant mind united with nobility. Professor Jay William Hudson, in _Abbé Pierre’s People_, owns that graceful, alluring, polished-surfaced prose, and kindly seeing, Stevenson taught us to know in his short stories, and Charles C. D. Roberts, the Canadian, in little word-canvasses that witched before us French Canada, white winter, and the delicate, blossom-touched, brief spring of the north. He is not only novelist, story writer, but distinguished philosopher, thinker. Pleasure has disappeared. Now to illumine _tædiam vitæ_ we have gain, efficiency, and a desire for swifter and swifter movement from place to place, _physical restlessness_. Monkeys in tropic forests move swiftly, daylong, from bough to bough. They are restless because they have no mind and can not _live_. The people whose physical movements are swiftest and most continual, we ask to write books, philosophize for us, become models of intellect. A rare item, this, in the Great Confusion! There are pleasures that are, of course, seemingly foolish. One of mine is just to hold in my hands old books printed in Venice. I suppose there is some difference between peasants on a money-holiday that lasts too long, and nimble-tailed monkeys aswing from tall tropic trees. Ellis Parker Butler declares _pigs is pigs_. Then monkeys must be monkeys, tails long or short.