f it is that Brown had something of the Celtic spirit--the
melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but
it is vitiated by what I can only call a schoolmaster's humour--cheap
and silly, such as imposes on immature minds. When he was quite serious
and simple, he wrote beautiful, quiet, wise letters, dealing with deep
things in a dignified way; but, as a rule, he thought it necessary to
cut ugly capers, and to do what can only be described as playing the
fool. I wish with all my heart that these letters had not been
published; they deform and disfigure a beautiful spirit and a quick
imagination.

Pose, affectation--what a snare they are to the better kind of minds. I
declare that I value every day more and more the signs of simplicity,
the people who say what they mean, and as they mean it; who don't think
what they think is expected of them, but what they really feel; who
don't pretend to enjoy what they don't enjoy, or to understand what
they don't understand.

I may be all wrong about Brown, of course, for the victory always
remains with the people who admire, rather than with the people who
criticise; people cannot be all on the same plane, and it is of no use
to quench enthusiasm by saying, "When you are older and wiser you will
think differently." The result of that kind of snub is only to make
people hold their tongues, and think one an old-fashioned pedant. I
sometimes wonder whether there is an absolute standard of beauty at
all, whether taste is not a sort of epidemic contagion, and whether the
accredited man of taste is not, as some one says, the man who has the
good fortune to agree most emphatically with the opinion of the
majority.

I am sure, however, you would not like the book; though I don't say
that you might not extract, as I do to my shame, a kind of bitter
pleasure in thinking how unconsciously absurd it is--the pleasure one
gets from watching the movements and gestures, and listening to the
remarks of a profoundly affected and complacent person. But that is not
an elevated kind of pleasure, when all is said and done!

"We get no good,
By being ungenerous, even to a book!"

as Mrs. Browning says. . . .--Ever yours.

T. B.

UPTON,
Nov. 15, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--A controversy, a contest! How they poison all one's
thoughts! I am at present wading, as Ruskin says, in a sad marsh or
pool of thought. Let me indicate to you without excess