that he _could_ write beautiful and pure English, but
that he should descend to the style of some of his later works was a
melancholy example of misdirected energy. . . . Charles Dickens was
perhaps the most extraordinary genius of those who had endeavoured to
deal with fiction as illustrative of the actual experiences of life.
With Dickens there stood the great figure of Thackeray, who had left a
great collection of books, very unequal in their quality, but
containing amongst them some of the finest things ever written in the
English tongue. The two great historians were Macaulay and Froude.
To-day we had no great novelist. Would anyone suggest we had a poet?
(Laughter.) After the year 1860 there were two great names in
poetry--the two Rossettis. There had been no book produced in the last
ten years which could compete with any one of the books produced from
1850 to 1860.'

To this Mr. Edmund Gosse replied a week later at the Dinner of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. He reminded his audience that even the most
perspicuous people in past times had made the grossest blunders when
they judged their own age. Let them remember the insensibility of
Montaigne to the merits of all his contemporaries. In the next age,
and in their own country, Ben Jonson took occasion at the very moment
when Shakespeare was producing his masterpieces, to lament the total
decay of poetry in England. We could not see the trees for the wood
behind them, but we ought to be confident they were growing all the
time.

{230}

Mr. Gosse also wrote to the _Times_ on behalf of "the Profession" of
Letters, reminding Sir Edward of the names of Swinburne and William
Morris, Hardy and Stevenson, Creighton and Gardiner, and asking what
would be the feelings of the learned gentleman if Meredith or Leslie
Stephen (of whose existence he was perhaps unaware) should put the
question in public, "Would anyone suggest we have an Advocate?"

Sir Edward, in his rejoinder, had no difficulty in showing that Mr.
Gosse's citation of Montaigne and Jonson was not verbally exact. Mr.
Birrell added some comments which were distinguished by being printed
in type of a markedly different size.

To the author of these lines, the controversy appears so typical and so
likely to arise again, that he desires to record, in however slight a
form, his recollection of it, and his own personal bias, which is in no
degree lessened by reconsideration after ten years.

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