my own, _bien
entendu_: H.G. Wells's "New Worlds for Old." If it is not in its fiftieth
thousand the intelligent masses ought to go into a month's sackcloth.
"Nature Poems," by William H. Davies. This slim volume is quite
indubitably wondrous. I won't say that it contains some of the most
lyrical lyrics in English, but I will say that there are lyrics in it as
good as have been produced by anybody at all in the present century. "A
Poor Man's House," by Stephen Reynolds. Young Mr. Reynolds has already
been fully accepted by the aforesaid intelligent masses, and I have no
doubt that he is tolerably well satisfied with 1908. Nietzsche's "Ecce
Homo." When this book gets translated into English (I have been reading it
in Henri Albert's French translation) it will assuredly be laughed at. I
would hazard that it is the most conceited book ever written. Take our
four leading actor-managers; extract from them all their conceit; multiply
that conceit by the self-satisfaction of Mr. F.E. Smith, M.P., when he has
made a joke; and raise the result to the Kaiser-power, and you will have
something less than the cube-root of Nietzsche's conceit in this the last
book he wrote. But it is a great book, full of great things.

HENRY OSPOVAT

[_14 Jan. '09_]

The death of that distinguished draughtsman and painter, Henry Ospovat,
who was among the few who can illustrate a serious author without
insulting him, ought not to pass unnoticed. Because an exhibition of his
caricatures made a considerable stir last year it was generally understood
that he was destined exclusively for caricature. But he was a man who
could do several things very well indeed, and caricature was only one of
these things. In Paris he would certainly have made a name and a fortune
as a caricaturist. They have more liberty there. Witness Rouveyre's
admirable and appalling sketch of Sarah Bernhardt in the current _Mercure
de France_. I never met Ospovat, but I was intimate with some of his
friends while he was at South Kensington. In those days I used to hear
"what Ospovat thought" about everything. He must have been listened to
with great respect by his fellow-students. And sometimes one of them would
come to me, with the air of doing me a favour (as indeed he was) and say:
"Look here. Do you want to buy something good, at simply no price at all?"
And I became the possessor of a beautiful sketch by Ospovat, while the
intermediary went off with a look on his face a