and evidently had the gift of inspiring other people; high-minded and intelligent men speak of him, in the little memoir that precedes the letters, with a pathetic reverence and a profound belief in the man’s originality, and even genius.  I was so sure that I should enjoy the book that I ordered it before it was published, and, when it appeared, it was a very profound disappointment.  I don’t mean to say that there are not beautiful things in it; it shows one a wholesome nature and a grateful, kindly heart; but, in the first place, he writes a terrible style, the kind of style that imposes on simple people because it is allusive, and what is called unconventional; to me it is simply spasmodic and affected.  The man seems, as a rule, utterly unable to say anything in a simple and delicate way; his one object appears to be not to use the obvious word.  He has a sort of jargon of his own—­a dreadful jargon.  He must write “crittur” or “craythur,” when he means “creature”; he says “Yiss, ma’am, I’d be glad to jine the Book Club”; he uses the word “galore”; he talks of “the resipiscential process” when he means growing wiser—­at least I think that is what he means.  The following, taken quite at random, are specimens of the sort of passages that abound:—­

“Rain, too, is one of my joys.  I want to wash myself, soak myself in it; hang myself over a meridian to dry; dissolve (still better) into rags of soppy disintegration, blotting paper, mash and splash and hash of inarticulate protoplasm.”

I suppose that both he and his friends thought that picturesque; to me it is neither beautiful nor amusing—­simply ugly and aggravating.

Here again:—­

“On the Quantocks I feel fairies all round me, the good folk, meet companions for young poets.  How Coleridge, more especially, fits in to such surroundings!  ‘Fairies?’ say you.  Well, there’s odds of fairies, and of the sort I mean Coleridge was the absolute Puck.  ‘Puck?’ says you.  ‘For shame!’ says you.  No, d—­n it!  I’ll stick to that.  There’s odds o’ fairies, and often enough I think the world is nothing else; troops, societies, hierarchies—­S.T.C., a supreme hierarch; look at his face; think of meeting him at moonlight between Stowey and Alfoxden, like a great white owl, soft and plumy, with eyes of flame!”

I confess that such passages simply make me blush, leave me with a kind of mental nausea.  What makes it worse is that there is something in what he says, if he would only say it better.  It makes me feel as I should feel if I saw an elderly, heavily-built clergyman amusing himself in a public place with a skipping-rope, to show what a child of nature he was.

I cannot help feeling that the man was a poseur, and that his affectations were the result of living in a small and admiring coterie.  If, when one begins to write and talk in that jesting way, there is some one at your elbow to say, “How refreshing, how original, how rugged!” I suppose that one begins to think that one had better indulge oneself in such absurdities.  But readers outside the circle turn away in disgust.