miliar with a book once famous, the
_Diary of a Lover of Literature_ of Thomas Green, written down to the
very end of the eighteenth century, have in their hands a volume in
which the very accents of Lord Cromer may seem to be heard. Isaac
d'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors in the dust;
Lord Cromer had a short way with many of the writers most fashionable at
this moment. When he was most occupied with the resuscitations of
ancient manners, of which I have already spoken, I found to my surprise
that he had never read _Marius the Epicurean_. I recommended it to him,
and with his usual instant response to suggestion, he got it at once and
began reading it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm,
and, what was not like him, he did not read _Marius_ to the end. The
richness and complication of Pater's style annoyed him. He liked prose
to be clear and stately; he liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even
Gibbon-though he read _The Decline and Fall_ over again, very carefully,
so late as 1913--was not entirely to his taste. He enjoyed the limpidity
and the irony, but the sustained roll of Gibbon's antitheses vexed him a
little. He liked prose to be quite simple.

In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and desultory conversations
about literature which will be so perennial a delight to look back upon,
betrayed his constitutional detestation of the Romantic attitude. He
believed himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and resented
the charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact, irritated by the excesses
and obscurities of much that is fashionable to-day in the world of
letters, and he refused his tribute of incense to several popular idols.
He thought that, during the course of the nineteenth century, German
influences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in Europe. I do
not know that Lord Cromer had pursued these impressions very far, or
that he had formed any conscious theory with regard to them. But he was
very "eighteenth century" in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and I always
found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a visionary or mystical
order. It was impossible that so intelligent and omnivorous a reader as
he should not be drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was
puzzled by him. He described him as "manifestly a man full of contrasts,
difficult to understand, and as many-sided as Odysseus." On another
occasion, losing patience with Pascal, he called him