one never can remember which one took; the four volumes, however, of Bede in Giles’s Anglican Fathers are not open to this objection, and I have reserved them for favourable consideration.  Mather’s Magnalia might do, but the binding does not please me; Cureton’s Corpus Ignatianum might also do if it were not too thin.  I do not like taking Norton’s Genuineness of the Gospels, as it is just possible someone may be wanting to know whether the Gospels are genuine or not, and be unable to find out because I have got Mr. Norton’s book.  Baxter’s Church History of England, Lingard’s Anglo-Saxon Church, and Cardwell’s Documentary Annals, though none of them as good as Frost, are works of considerable merit; but on the whole I think Arvine’s Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote is perhaps the one book in the room which comes within measurable distance of Frost.  I should probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title.  “I am not curious,” as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, “but I like to know,” and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing a moral and religious anecdote is.  I know, of course, that there are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling them either moral or religious, though some of them certainly seem as if they might fairly find a place in Mr. Arvine’s work.  There are some things, however, which it is better not to know, and take it all round I do not think I should be wise in putting myself in the way of temptation, and adopting Arvine as the successor to my beloved and lamented Frost.

Some successor I must find, or I must give up writing altogether, and this I should be sorry to do.  I have only as yet written about a third, or from that—­counting works written but not published—­to a half of the books which I have set myself to write.  It would not so much matter if old age was not staring me in the face.  Dr. Parr said it was “a beastly shame for an old man not to have laid down a good cellar of port in his youth”; I, like the greater number, I suppose, of those who write books at all, write in order that I may have something to read in my old age when I can write no longer.  I know what I shall like better than anyone can tell me, and write accordingly; if my career is nipped in the bud, as seems only too likely, I really do not know where else I can turn for present agreeable occupation, nor yet how to make suitable provision for my later years.  Other writers can, of course, make excellent provision for their own old ages, but they cannot do so for mine, any more than I should succeed if I were to try to cater for theirs.  It is one of those cases in which no man can make agreement for his brother.