became known in Paradise, it
caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but a profound sensation.

M. Anatole France is no mean theologian himself. He reports with great
casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council assembled in
Heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of
religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned
into human beings; and together with the privilege of sublime hopes these
innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the
miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen
condition of humanity.

At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the
Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the
Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the development of their
civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly
and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen lightens
by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted
to a subject so grave as the Polity of Penguins. It is a very admirable
treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on the
feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a
shelf.

TURGENEV {2}--1917

Dear Edward,

I am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of Turgenev, that
fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for
himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to
him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck
persists after his death. What greater luck an artist like Turgenev
could wish for than to find in the English-speaking world a translator
who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his
work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high
qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.

After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship
too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of
your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes
of Turgenev's complete edition, the last of which came into the light of
public indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.

With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev
had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of
the transitory formulas and