of time and trouble than taking down
the _Gamekeeper at Home_ from his club bookshelf and perusing a
chapter or so before settling down to work. There is not the slightest
harm in his doing this: the mistake lies in thinking local color
(however acquired) of the first importance.

In judging fiction there is probably no safer rule than to ask one's
self, How far does the pleasure excited in me by this book depend upon
the transitory and trivial accidents that distinguish this time, this
place, this character, from another time, another place, another
character? And how far upon the abiding elements of human life, the
constant temptations, the constant ambitions, and the constant
nobility and weakness of the human heart? These are the essentials,
and no amount of documents or local color can fill their room.

* * * * *

Sept. 30, 1893. The Country as "Copy".

The case of a certain small volume of verse in which I take some
interest, and its treatment at the hands of the reviewers, seems to me
to illustrate in a sufficiently amusing manner a trick that the
British critic has been picking up of late. In a short account of Mr.
Hosken, the postman poet, written by way of preface to his _Verses by
the Way_ (Methuen & Co.), I took occasion to point out that he is not
what is called in the jargon of these days a "nature-poet"; that his
poetic bent inclines rather to meditation than to description; and
that though his early struggles in London and elsewhere have made him
acquainted with many strange people in abnormal conditions of life,
his interest has always lain, not in these striking anomalies, but in
the destiny of humanity as a whole and its position in the great
scheme of things.

These are simple facts. I found them, easily enough, in Mr. Hosken's
verse--where anybody else may find them. They also seem to me to be,
for a critic's purpose, ultimate facts. It is an ultimate fact that
Publius Virgilius Maro wore his buskins somewhat higher in the heel
than did Quintus Horatius Flaccus: and no critic, to my knowledge,
has been impertinent enough to point out that, since Horace had some
experience of the tented field, while Virgil was a stay-at-home
courtier, therefore Horace should have essayed to tell the martial
exploits of Trojan and Rutulian while Virgil contented himself with
the gossip of the Via Sacra. Yet--to compare small things with
great--this is the mistake into which our cr