These writers whom I have mentioned seem to me all like little bubbling rivulets, each with a motion, a grace, a character of its own.  But what one craves for is a river deep and wide, for some one, with a great flood of humanity like Scott, or with a leaping cataract of irrepressible humour like Dickens, or with a core of white-hot passion like Charlotte Bronte, or a store of brave and wholesome gaiety and zest, such as Stevenson showed.

Well, we must wait and hope.  Meanwhile I will write to my great book-taster; one of the few men alive with great literary vitality, who has never indulged the temptation to write, and has never written a line.  I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright volumes shall be packed for you.  The one condition is that you shall write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations.  The only thing is to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is mere sheep-like grazing—­forty feeding like one.—­Ever yours,

T. B.

Ashfield,
settle,
Sept. 4, 1904.

Dear Herbert,—­I have been reading FitzGerald’s pretty essay Euphranor.  It is Platonic both in form and treatment, but I never feel that it is wholly successful.  Most of the people who express admiration for it know nothing of the essay except a delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus.  But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous.  However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from Digby’s Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth.  “They [the young] are easily put to Shame” (so runs the script), “for they have no resources to set aside the precepts which they have learned; and they have lofty souls, for they have never been disgraced or brought low, and they are unacquainted with Necessity; they prefer Honour to Advantage, Virtue to Expediency; for they live by Affection rather than by Reason, and Reason is concerned with Expediency, but Affection with Honour.”

All very beautiful and noble, no doubt; but is it real? was I, were you, creatures of this make?  Could these fine things have been truthfully said of us?  Perhaps you may think it of yourself, but I can only regretfully say that I do not recognise it.

My boyhood and youth were, it seems to me, very faulty things.  My age is faulty still, more’s the pity.  But without any vain conceit, and with all the humility which is given by a knowledge of weakness, I can honestly say that in particular points I have improved a little.  I am not generous or noble-hearted now; but I have not lost these qualities, for I never had them.  As a boy and a young man I distinctly preferred Advantage to Honour; I was the prey of Expediency, and seldom gave Virtue a thought.