dmitted as a literary admirer, with
sympathy in a bruised state of liquefaction, I maintain that the
season for uttering a few words is clearly at hand, and should be
turned to the advantage of retrospect.

Being bred of a generation which has read, with a spirit attuned
to the pleasant influences of an Academic and a Saracenic art, the
writings of John Henry Shorthouse, and ever discovering them to
contain philosophic importance and pyschologic expression decidedly
above the astuteness and ability of average writers; and having
usually in them remarked wisdom, council and knowledge reminiscent
of the inspired logicial writers and divines of the law-given
Testaments; in point of enquiry, I am summarily induced to champion
the belief that the psychologic, emphatic style adopted by the writer,
with the success in high quarters attendant the disposal of his
works, has not, convincingness being the indicator, been reached, nor
surpassed. The Warwickshire alchemist invariably throws across his
scenes and to the centre, a glare, a strong ray, which burns to the
water-line the barque of Agnosticism. This is tacitly recognised,
concurrently and alternately traced in the selection of the phrases,
and in the subtle or dramatic sense of the scene photographed; the
second inspiration springing into immediate co-operation, linking to
the first the thought by a magnetised hyphen, causes his symbolistic
pictures to thrive gloriously, rapturously; the first touch of
sensitized matter at times appearing grotesque, dimly lit, although
never flimsy. This pedantic, pictorial, even scholarly system by our
revered writer adopted, is bent, applied to meet extreme passes of
imaginative perfection and delicacy. The picture is naively introduced
and obscurely, somewhat trenchantly elaborated, allows itself to be
apologetically understood; whilst in succession the lower taste
for animal sentiment is sorcerized by vivid flashes of captivating
contrast, forked, as lightning, and left, as embers smouldering to
glow in the crucible of memory's recesses. Specious instances of irony
playing the manliest part: flashes of meteoric, mesmeric eloquence,
fitfully flecking the embossed page, as one tier or set of ideas,
in rhetoric orchestration, symphonizes with or eclipses another.
Connection, an element of robust mesmeric cohesion with this prized
author being the adamantine hyphen, the articulating link, which
compacts the roll. John Henry Shorthouse, t