I don’t like your Shakspeare article quite as well as the first _Supernatural_ one, or rather I should say it does not greatly add to it in my (first) view, though both might gain by embodiment in one. I think there is _some_ truth in the charge of metaphysical involution--the German element as I should call it--and surely you are strong enough to be English pure and simple. I am sure I could write 100 essays, on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under the title, _Essays written in the intervals of Elephantiasis, Hydro-phobia, and Penal Servitude_), without once experiencing the “aching void” which is filled by such words as “mythopoeic,” and “anthropomorphism.” I do not find life long enough to know in the least what they mean. They are both very long and very ugly indeed--the latter only suggesting to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal. (To speak rationally, would not “man-evolved Godhead” be an _English_ equivalent?) “Euhemeristic” also found me somewhat on my beam-ends, though explanation is here given; yet I felt I could do without Euhemerus; and _you_ perhaps without the _humerous_. You can pardon me now; for _so_ bad a pun places me at your mercy indeed. But seriously, simple English in prose writing and in all narrative poetry (however monumental language may become in abstract verse) seems to me a treasure not to be foregone in favour of German innovations. I know Coleridge went in latterly for as much Germanism as his time could master; but his best genius had then left him. It seems necessary to mention that I lectured in 1880, on the relation of politics to art, and in printing the lecture I asked Rossetti to accept the dedication of it, but this he declined to do in the generous terms I have already referred to. The letter that accompanied his graceful refusal is, however, so full of interesting personal matter that I offer it in this place, with no further explanation than that my essay was designed to show that just as great artists in past ages had participated in political struggles, so now they should not hold themselves aloof from controversies which immediately concern them: