s recently gone by the name of philosophy; and perhaps
it might shake Signor Benedetto Croce (whom it is hardly necessary to
say I do _not_ include among the "chatterers") in his opinion that
though, as he once too kindly said, I am a _valente letterato_, I am
sadly _digiuno di filosofia_.[6] But it is "too late a week" for this.
And I have lost my library.

Then there was a _History of Wine_, which was actually commissioned,
planned, and begun just before I was appointed to my Chair at Edinburgh,
and which I gave up, not from any personal pusillanimity or loss of
interest in the subject, but partly because I had too much else to do,
and because I thought it unfair to expose that respectable institution
to the venom of the most unscrupulous of all fanatics--those of
teetotalism. I could take this up with pleasure: but I have lost my
cellar.

What I should really like to do would be to translate _in extenso_ Dr.
Sommer's re-edition of the Vulgate Arthuriad. But I should probably die
before I had done half of it; no publisher would undertake the risk of
it; and if any did, "Dora," reluctant to die, would no doubt put us both
in 'prison for using so much paper. Therefore I had better be content
with the divine suggestion, and not spoil it by my human failure to
execute.

And so I may say, for good, _Valete_ to the public, abandoning the rest
of the leave-taking to their discretion.[7]

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH,
_Christmas_, 1918.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is perhaps worth while to observe that I did not "edit" this, and
that I had nothing whatever to do with any part of it except the
_Introduction_ and my earlier translation of the _Chronique de Charles
IX_, which was, I believe, reprinted in it.

[2] In very great strictness an exception should perhaps be made for
notice of him, and of some others, in _The Later Nineteenth Century_
(Edinburgh and London, 1907).

[3] There will, for pretty obvious reasons, be fewer of these than in
the former volume. The texts are much more accessible; there is no
difficulty about the language, such as people, however unnecessarily,
sometimes feel about French up to the sixteenth century; and the space
is wanted for other things. If I have kept one or two of my old ones it
is because they have won approval from persons whose approval is worth
having, and are now out of print: while I have added one or two
others--to please myself. Translations--in s