and so to the end of the chapter. The theme is not absorbing, and the variations are proper to the theme. After All. How long is it that the wise and good have ceased to say (striking their pensive bosoms), '_Here_ lies Gay'? It is--how long? But for all that Gay is yet a figure in English letters. As a song-writer he has still a claim on us, and is still able to touch the heart and charm the ear. The lyrics in _Acis and Galatea_ are not unworthy their association with Handel's immortal melodies, the songs in _The Beggars' Opera_ have a part in the life and fame of the sweet old tunes from which they can never be divided. I like to believe that in the operas and the _Trivia_ and _The Shepherd's Week_ is buried the material of a pleasant little book. ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS The Good of Them. It is our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. There are folk in plenty who have never read Montaigne at all; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and that page but once. And the same may be said of Addison and Fielding, of Lamb and Hazlitt, of Sterne and Bacon and Ben Jonson, and all the members of their goodly fellowship. To sit down with any one of them is to sit down in the company of one of the 'mighty wits, our elders and our betters,' who have done much to make literature a good thing, having written books that are eternally readable. If of all them that have tried to write essays and succeeded after a fashion a twentieth part so much could be said the world would have a conversational literature of inexhaustible interest. But indeed there is nothing of the sort. Beside the 'rare and radiant' masters of the art there are the apprentices, and these are many and dull. Generalities.