of timid idealists, who worship beauty in secret, as to sell large editions of his works and make a good income, then we reward him in our clumsy way with glory and worship.  It is horrible to reflect that if Shelley had succeeded to his father’s baronetcy he would probably have had at once an increased circulation.  If Keats had been a peer like Byron, he would have been loaded with vapid commendation.  We still cling pathetically in our seats of education to the study of Greek, but whenever the Greek spirit appears, that insatiable appetite for impressions of beauty, that intense desire for mental activity, we think it rather shocking and disreputable.  We are at heart commercial Puritans all the time; we loathe experiments and originality and independence; we think that God rewards respectability, because we believe that material rewards—­wealth, comfort, position—­are the only things worth having.  We call ourselves Christians, and we crucify the Christ-like spirit of simplicity and liberty.  But let us at least make up our minds as to what we desire, and not try to arrive at a disgusting compromise.  Our way is to persecute genius living and to crown it dead.  Can we not make a sincere attempt to recognise it when it is among us, to look out for it, to encourage it, instead of acting in the spirit of Pickwickian caution, and when there are two mobs, to shout with the largest?

LI

I have been reading the Memoir of J.H.  Shorthouse, and it has been a great mystery to me.  It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that is there revealed.  He was a well-to-do manufacturer—­of vitriol, too, of all the incongruous things.  He belonged to a cultivated suburban circle, that soil where the dullest literary flowers grow and flourish.  He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in the morning, and returned in the afternoon to a high tea.  In the evening he wrote and read aloud.  The only thing that made him different from other men was that he had the fear of epileptic attacks for ever hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a very painful and violent stammer.  I saw him twice in my life; remote impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth.  On the first occasion I saw a small, sturdily built man, with a big, clerical sort of face with marked features, and, as far as I can recollect, rather coppery in hue.  There was a certain grotesqueness communicated to the face by large, thin, fly-away whiskers of the kind that used to be known as “weepers” or “Dundrearies.”  He had then just dawned upon the world as a celebrity.  I had myself as an under-graduate read and re-read and revelled in John Inglesant, and I was intensely curious to see him and worship him.  But he was not a very worshipful man.  He gave the impression of great courtesy and simplicity; but his stammer