t you could write a useful
sort of play if you were started. When I was in Kerry last month I
had occasionally a few moments to spare; and it seemed to me quite
unendurable that you should be wasting your time writing books about
me. I liked the book very much, especially as it was so completely
free from my own influence, being evidently founded on a very hazy
recollection of a five-year-old perusal of Man and Superman; but a
lot of it was fearful nonsense. There was one good thing about the
scientific superstition which you came a little too late for. It
taught a man to respect facts. You have no conscience in this
respect; and your punishment is that you substitute such dull
inferences as my "narrow puritan home" for delightful and fantastic
realities which you might very easily have ascertained if you had
taken greater advantage of what is really the only thing to be said
in favour of Battersea; namely, that it is within easy reach of
Adelphi Terrace. However, I have no doubt that when Wilkins Micawber
junior grew up and became eminent in Australia, references were made
to his narrow puritan home; so I do not complain. If you had told the
truth, nobody would have believed it.

Now to business. When one breathes Irish air, one becomes a
practical man. In England I used to say what a pity it was you did
not write a play. In Ireland I sat down and began writing a scenario
for you. But before I could finish it I had come back to London; and
now it is all up with the scenario: in England I can do nothing but
talk. I therefore now send you the thing as far as I scribbled it;
and I leave you to invent what escapades you please for the hero, and
to devise some sensational means of getting him back to heaven again,
unless you prefer to end with the millennium in full swing.*

[* The scenario dealt with the return of St. Augustine to the England
he remembered converting.]

But experience has made me very doubtful of the efficacy of help as
the means of getting work out of the right sort of man. When I was
young I struck out one invaluable rule for myself, which was,
Whenever you meet an important man, contradict him. If possible,
insult him. But such a rule is one of the privileges of youth. I no
longer live by rules. Yet there is one way in which you may possibly
be insultable. It can be plausibly held that you are a venal