e practised that most debonair of all the arts, the
ingenious way of miscellaneous writing! Now, as highly successful
novelists always say nowadays when interviewed for highly successful
newspapers, "I know very little about literature," but I fancy this
benign way of writing had its well-spring in those preposterous days,
now long fled, when men of reading were content to give their best
thoughts first to their friends and then--ten years or so
afterwards--to the "publick." Its period was the day of the
"wits"--those beaux of the mind.

I guess the reason it has gone by the board is that it was what would
be called "literary." And there is nothing we are so scared of to-day
as the literary. It was not those dons the critics, we are told on the
subway cards, who made Dickens immortal--it was YOU. And our foremost
magazines advertise the "un-literary essay." "Literary expression,"
that Addisonian English stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the
lack of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts. What we want is
writers who have something to say, and who say it naturally and without
any beating about the bush.

While the spell of miscellaneous writing, for those who savour it, is
the author's joyous inability, it would seem, to get any "forrader," to
stick to the point, to carry anything with a rush. See the greatest
miscellaneous writer who ever lived, as an admirable later
miscellaneous writer the late (in a literary sense) Hon. Augustine
Birrell calls him, the Rev. Laurence Sterne. See positively the most
buoyant book in all the world; I mean, of course, "The Path to Rome,"
by Hilaire Belloc. That glorious newspaper article, "Is Genius
Conscious of Its Power?" starts off, indeed, with an allusion to the
subject of genius. But the genius of this writer, of such unsurpassed
and ingratiating savagery, soon turns to its true business of getting
lost in the woods, and we take it from William Hazlitt that all in
power are a lot of crooks.

So one born under the miscellaneous writer's star who purposed to write
on, say, bums he had known would quite likely begin with a disquisition
upon the importance of a good shape of human ear, and very naturally
would conclude, with some warmth, with a denunciation of tight
trowsers. And he would, of course, wander by the way into pleasant
reminiscences of his childhood--how, for instance, the child gets his
idea of what a native is from the cuts in his geography book. I