nreality. Her poems suggest once more the
atmosphere of an age already dead and half-forgotten; of Sunday
afternoons in large rooms with long blinds, behind which men yawn and
cultivated women are earnest and playful; of a world in which people
must pretend courageously that life is very important for fear of
discovering that it hardly signifies. It is a strange world, faded,
friendly, urbane, and, we are happy to think, already infinitely remote.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] "Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge." With a Memoir
by Edith Sichel. (Constable and Co.)

This review, when first published, gave pain, I know; it gave pain to
friends of Miss Coleridge and to friends of Miss Sichel and to many of
the charming people who were friends of both. The pain, of course, I
regret; but I cannot say that I regret the article. The criticism still
seems to me fair, and I know that it was honest: nevertheless, were Miss
Sichel alive, I should not care to reprint it. But that able and
friendly lady is now dead, and her eulogy has been pronounced by those
who knew her best and could best appreciate her. I, of course, have
criticized her only in her public character, as a writer, and in so
doing have transgressed no law that I, at any rate, can respect. As
Voltaire says, "On doit des egards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que
la verite." To the living, perhaps, I have not always been as civil as
could have been desired; but of the dead I have told no lies that I am
aware of.

PEACOCK[4]

I

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Feb. 1911_]

In the first place, were these plays worth publishing? With some
hesitation we will admit that they were. Presumably the possessors of
Messrs. Dent's pretty edition, or of any edition for that matter, will
be glad to set this small volume beside the others and thus become
owners of the complete prose works of an English classic. For Peacock is
a classic; otherwise they might well have been allowed to acquire that
portentous dignity which grows like moss on ancient and unprinted MSS.
in the British Museum. Here and there, in the farces, one may discover
examples of truly "Peacockian" wit and style, but these rare gems have
mostly been worked into the novels; while the residue, which includes a
drama in blank verse, has little if any intrinsic value. The earliest
works of Peacock--a brilliant amateur to the last--are as amateurish as
the earliest works of his friend Shelley and as thin and