I have filled my canvas with trivial things, with intimate details, with what now seem the insignificant aspects of life. But the insignificant aspects of life concern us mightily while we live; and it is by their help that we understand the insignificant people who are sometimes reckoned of importance. A hundred years ago many men and women were reckoned of importance, at whose claims their successors to-day smile scornfully. Yet they and their work were woven into the tissue of things, into the warp and woof of social conditions, into the literary history of England. An hour is not too precious to waste upon them, however feeble their pretensions. Perhaps some idle reader in the future will do as much by us.

A. R.

CONTENTS

A Happy Half-Century[ 1]
The Perils of Immortality[ 16]
When Lalla Rookh was Young[ 32]
The Correspondent[ 51]
The Novelist[ 73]
On the Slopes of Parnassus[ 94]
The Literary Lady[ 116]
The Child[ 138]
The Educator[ 155]
The Pietist[ 177]
The Accursed Annual[ 196]
Our Accomplished Great-Grandmother [ 217]
The Album Amicorum[ 234]

“A Happy Half-Century,” “The Perils of Immortality,” and “The Correspondent” appeared first in Harper’s Magazine, “Our Accomplished Great-Grandmother” in Harper’s Bazar, and “On the Slopes of Parnassus” in the Atlantic Monthly; they are here reprinted by permission of the publishers of those magazines.

A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY

This damn’d unmasculine canting age!

Charles Lamb.

There are few of us who do not occasionally wish we had been born in other days, in days for which we have some secret affinity, and which shine for us with a mellow light in the deceitful pages of history. Mr. Austin Dobson, for example, must have sighed more than once to see Queen Anne on Queen Victoria’s throne; and the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes must have realized that the reign of Elizabeth was the reign for him. There is a great deal lost in being born out of date. What freak of fortune thrust Galileo into the world three centuries too soon, and held back Richard Burton’s restless soul until he was three centuries too late?

For myself, I confess that the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make up my chosen period, and that my motive for so choosing is contemptible. It was not a time distinguished—in England at least—for wit or wisdom, for public virtues or for private charm; but it was a time when literary reputations were so cheaply gained that nobody needed to despair of one. A taste for platitudes, a tinge of Pharisaism, an appreciation of the commonplace,—and the thing was done. It was in the latter half of this blissful period that we find that enthusiastic chronicler, Mrs. Cowley, writing in “Public Characters” of “the proud preëminence which, in all the varieties of excellence produced by the pen, the pencil, or the lyre, the ladies of Great Britain have attained over contemporaries in every other country in Europe.”