It is high time to speak of the prose. The essays are "A Defence of Cosmetics," by Mr. Max Beerbohm, and "Reticence in Literature," by Mr. Arthur Waugh. I notice that a critic in the New York _Nation_ says that the Whistlerian affectations of Mr. Beerbohm are particularly intolerable. I understood his essay to be merely a _jeu d'esprit_, and found that it amused me, though the tastes and opinions ingeniously expressed in it are precisely the opposite of my own. Mr. Beerbohm is (or pretends to be) entirely on the side of artifice against nature. The difficulty is to determine what _is_ nature. The easiest and most "natural" manners of a perfect English lady are the result of art, and of a more advanced art than that indicated by more ceremonious manners. Mr. Beerbohm says that women in the time of Dickens appear to have been utterly natural in their conduct, "flighty, gushing, blushing, fainting, giggling, and shaking their curls." Much of that conduct may have been as artificial as the curls themselves, and assumed only to attract attention. Ladies used to faint on the slightest pretext, not because it was natural but because it was the fashion; when it ceased to be the fashion they abandoned the practice. Mr. Waugh's essay on "Reticence in Literature" is written more seriously, and is not intended to amuse. He defends the principle of reticence, but the only sanction that he finds for it is a temporary authority imposed by the changing taste of the age. We are consequently never sure of any permanent law that will enforce any reticence whatever. A good proof of the extreme laxity of the present taste is that Mr. Waugh himself has been able to print at length three of the most grossly sensual stanzas in Mr. Swinburne's "Dolores." Reticence, however, is not concerned only with sexual matters. There is, for instance, a flagrant want of reticence in the lower political press of France and America, and the same violent kind of writing, often going as far beyond truth as beyond decency, is beginning to be imitated in England. One rule holds good universally; all high art is reticent, _e.g._, in Dante's admirable way of telling the story of Francesca through her own lips.