"People who are old enough to write memoirs," says my friend Shane Leslie in _The End of a Chapter_, "have usually lost their memory." They have always, he might have added, lost the enthusiasm which once inspired and is alone able to explain their part in what they are trying to remember. Going farther, he might have challenged in words, as his book challenged by implication, the belief that there is any day in a man's life on which--though not an hour before--he is entitled to set down his reminiscences; yet one page from the journal of Alcibiades at twenty might well be more instructive than three volumes of the wisdom of Socrates at seventy. My reason for writing the present book is that I wish to record certain impressions of a vanished generation while I remember them clearly and sympathetically; my excuse for publishing it is that the opinions and recollections of middle life are so seldom articulate. Reminiscences of childhood, where they survive undimmed, find their place in fiction and in autobiography; reminiscences of youth and manhood, collected and chastened from the sober angle of old age, are compressed into one patronising chapter of every standard life; but we are hardly ever allowed to look through the spectacles of thirty at the world as it appears to the eyes of thirty. Sometimes we are, indeed, admitted to the intimacy of a diary; but, if it has been composed with a view to publication, we may suspect that behind the pretext of self-communing the author is striking an attitude; if it was never intended for publication, we may wonder whether it should ever have been published. Possibly there is still room for recollections that have frankly been written for publication before age has too greatly blurred the outline of memory or distance eliminated too ruthlessly the unimportant. As the art of the novelist demands of him that he should first and foremost be a spectator of life, so the accident of race makes of him an involuntary critic if his lot be cast amid alien surroundings, however congenial; and the further accident of health not always robust may remove him a yet greater distance from the active life of his generation. In so far as this detachment gives him a separate standard of comparison, it may be not without value in the review of past manners and ideals.