Well, you will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. But what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to produce a similar book on similar lines, becomes very strong. Few living writers are above the need for earning money; but even that would not spoil a genius if we had him. These writers whom I have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of its own. But what one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great flood of humanity like Scott, or with a leaping cataract of irrepressible humour like Dickens, or with a core of white-hot passion like Charlotte Bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and zest, such as Stevenson showed. Well, we must wait and hope. Meanwhile I will write to my great book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a line. I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright volumes shall be packed for you. The one condition is that you shall write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. The only thing is to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is mere sheep-like grazing--forty feeding like one.--Ever yours, T. B. ASHFIELD, SETTLE, Sept. 4, 1904. DEAR HERBERT,--I have been reading FitzGerald's pretty essay Euphranor. It is Platonic both in form and treatment, but I never feel that it is wholly successful. Most of the people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from Digby's Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the young] are easily put to Shame" (so runs the script), "for they have no resources to set aside the precepts which they have learned; and they have lofty souls, for they have never been disgraced or brought low, and they are unacquainted with Necessity; they prefer Honour to Advantage, Virtue to Expediency; for they live by Affection rather than by Reason, and Reason is concerned with Expediency, but Affection with Honour."