only read him. Let them not talk about
him. He would be disturbing at dinner-parties, and impossible at
afternoon teas, and his whole life was a protest against platform
speaking. 'The perfect man ignores self; the divine man ignores action;
the true sage ignores reputation.' These are the principles of Chuang
Tzu.

Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer. Translated from the
Chinese by Herbert A. Giles, H.B.M.'s Consul at Tamsui. (Bernard
Quaritch.)

MR. PATER'S LAST VOLUME

(Speaker, March 22, 1890.)

When I first had the privilege--and I count it a very high one--of
meeting Mr. Walter Pater, he said to me, smiling, 'Why do you always
write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more
difficult.'

It was during my undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and
of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy
and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its
linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one
solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should
be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far
more rhyme than reason.

I may frankly confess now that at the time I did not quite comprehend
what Mr. Pater really meant; and it was not till I had carefully studied
his beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully
realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-
writing really is, or may be made to be. Carlyle's stormy rhetoric,
Ruskin's winged and passionate eloquence, had seemed to me to spring from
enthusiasm rather than from art. I do not think I knew then that even
prophets correct their proofs. As for Jacobean prose, I thought it too
exuberant; and Queen Anne prose appeared to me terribly bald, and
irritatingly rational. But Mr. Pater's essays became to me 'the golden
book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.' They are still this
to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I
certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no
love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only
about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really
unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed
opinion is always valueless.

But I must not allow this brief notice of Mr. Pater's new volume to
degenerate into an autobi