anour something so
finely official that I felt I should at least have the Government on my
side.

Thus it was with no sense of taking a farewell look, but rather to
survey a thing half-saved already, that I crossed over to the other
side of the road, and then, lifting my eyes, and looking to and fro,
beheld--what?

I blankly indicated the thing to my friend. How long had it been there,
that horrible, long, high frontage of grey stone? It must surely have
been there before either of us was born. It seemed to be a very perfect
specimen of 1860--1870 architecture--perfect in its pretentious and
hateful smugness.

And neither of us had ever known it was there.

Neither of us, therefore, could afford to laugh at the other; nor did
either of us laugh at himself; we just went blankly away, and parted. I
daresay my friend found presently, as I did, balm in the knowledge that
the Tivoli's frontage wouldn't, because it couldn't, be so bad as that
which we had just, for the first time, seen.

For me there was another, a yet stronger, balm. And I went as though I
trod on air, my heart singing within me. For I had not, after all, to
resume my task of writing that letter to The Times.

BOOKS WITHIN BOOKS 1914.

They must, I suppose, be classed among biblia abiblia [Greek]. Ignored
in the catalogue of any library, not one of them lurking in any
uttermost cavern under the reading-room of the British Museum, none of
them ever printed even for private circulation, these books written by
this and that character in fiction are books only by courtesy and good
will.

But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his
kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that
aren't. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A
volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book
because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was
worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the
specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this
rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words
well and appropriately printed and bound? If you can say Yes to these
questions, then only, I submit, is the title of 'book' deserved. If Lamb
were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than he did.
Published volumes were few in his day (though not, of course, few
enough). Even he, in all the plenitude