last lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment—­to enjoy slowly—­for nearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still.”  The man who can get through Horace Walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up late seems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an avarice of Walpole.  But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem to like his author.  His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does of Johnson, that he is “one of the greatest of Englishmen, one of the greatest men of letters, and one of the greatest of men.”  One of his complaints against Gray is that, though he liked Joseph Andrews, he “had apparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding’s real merits.”  As for Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury’s verdict is summed up in Dryden’s praise of Chaucer.  “Here is God’s plenty.”  In Tom Jones he contends that Fielding “puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as no novel-writer—­not even Cervantes—­had ever done before.”  For myself, I doubt whether the exaltation of Fielding has not become too much a matter of orthodoxy in recent years.  Compare him with Swift, and he is long-winded in his sentences.  Compare him with Sterne, and his characters are mechanical.  Compare him with Dickens, and he reaches none of the depths, either of laughter or of sadness.  This is not to question the genius of Fielding’s vivid and critical picture of eighteenth-century manners and morals.  It is merely to put a drag on the wheel of Mr Saintsbury’s galloping enthusiasm.

But, however one may quarrel with it, The Peace of the Augustans is a book to read with delight—­an eccentric book, an extravagant book, a grumpy book, but a book of rare and amazing enthusiasm for good literature.  Mr. Saintsbury’s constant jibes at the present age, as though no one had ever been unmanly enough to make a joke before Mr. Shaw, become amusing in the end like Dr. Johnson’s rudenesses.  And Mr. Saintsbury’s one attempt to criticize contemporary fiction—­where he speaks of Sinister Street in the same breath with Waverley and Pride and Prejudice—­is both amusing and rather appalling.  But, in spite of his attitude to his own times, one could not ask for more genial company on going on a pilgrimage among the Augustans.  Mr. Saintsbury has in this book written the most irresistible advertisement of eighteenth-century literature that has been published for many years.

(2) MR. GOSSE

Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are the two kings of Sparta among English critics of to-day.  They stand preeminent among those of our contemporaries who have served literature in the capacity of law-givers during the past fifty years.  I do not suggest that they are better critics than Mr. Birrell or Sir Sidney Colvin or the late Sir E.T.  Cook.  But none of these three was ever a professional and whole-time critic, as Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are.  One thinks of the latter primarily as the