een
haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters
where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not
find him lacking. Wherever a love of beauty and a ripened judgment of
men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man.

In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly
wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to
cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that
confound the unlettered--these are amiable trifles that endear him to
those who understand.

Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of comfort
and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding
English, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine
prose.

I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak
spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet;

And the men who were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.

Indeed let us hope that they will.

A POET OF SAD VIGILS

There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. Unquestionably
the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of tea, plenty of
tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss
Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would be the literary
remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young man who was a contemporary
of hers.

I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his beautiful hymn
"The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White?
But on the drawing-room tables of our grandmothers' girlhood the plump
volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place
near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal
Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of
several young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's
remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire
that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was
the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas!
Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even
Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a
parlous sport.

The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane
Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little
t