And yet he has written a sonnet or two, and at least one ode, that are as immortal, I suppose, as anything in letters.

But I don't seem to have told you very much about my bedside books. And the truth of it is that "Daisy's Aunt" is the only title that I can remember, though it may conveniently be stretched, perhaps, to embrace them all. For it concluded, if I remember rightly, with the matrimony of four persons; and the others also are now a blur to me of ultimate marriages—marriages between pathological pianists and high-born, introspective damsels; and marriages between athletic young gentlemen, good at puncture-mending, and the distressed maidens whose tyres had become deflated.

Of the books, on the other hand, that have made me read them—rare and beloved visitors—there have been fewer this year than usual, though it is I, and not the books, that must bear the chief blame for this. The two latest of these, separated by an interval of months, and both, I believe, already elderly as the lives of modern novels go, are "The Cliff End" and "Captain Margaret." The first of these delighted me from cover to cover, in spite of some exaggerations of character-drawing and dialogue; and I reverently bow my head to its author as having made himself at a bound the laureate, not only of the bath-tub, but of that peculiarly distressing variety of it that is very wide and shallow, with a dimple in it that cracks when you stand upon it, and a capacity for water that no housemaid has ever satisfied. It is perhaps too late for the nature of this vessel to change. But never more, with that rosy vision of sponging maidenhood before my eyes, shall I regard it as anything but blessed.

So it's a book for which I should like to prophesy life, though with less certainty, perhaps, than "Captain Margaret," upon the deck of his Broken Heart, carries the very germ of it in his delicate hands. For to his eldorado of dreams we have all of us, at one time or another, turned our eyes. And in his schooner might have sailed any Quixote of history, lucky indeed to find a Cammock for his navigator.

And yet who am I to be thus prophesying so boldly? For the third of my books has been a collection of Oscar Wilde's contributions to the "Pall Mall Gazette," full of such forecasts, and written, too, by a practised hand. Has one half of them been verified? I think not. And yet I suspect that few critics could more equably confront a reprinting of their twenty-year-old opinions. Looking through this book, I read, for example, whole pages devoted to the novel of Miss So-and-so whom one would have supposed, in the eighties, to have been an emerging George Eliot. And how desperately must the praise have fired her to further efforts. Yet what, in 1910, has become of poor Miss So-and-so; and where are those great works that were so certainly to be? There is the writer himself too, so young then, with his brilliant flippancies—his impeachment of the British Cook, for instance, with her passion for combining pepper and gravy and calling it soup, and her inveterate habit of sending up bread poultices with pheasant—and all his promises of grace.

So, upon the whole, it's a sad book; and here, for a brisker comment upon all that I have been writing, comes a volume of American essays that has just been lent to Esther, wherein I am positively assured that the volumes of Mrs. Humphry Ward are quite dangerously immoral! While there, upon a chair, lies a novel, "Mr. Meeson's Will," that Rupert Morris has just recommended to me as being his beau-ideal of a really outstanding story. So let me lie low. I have spoken out my literary heart to you, as any man, on occasion, should have the courage to do. But now let me lie low. For by what standards am I judging, after all, who have only spent an hour in Chicago, and never a moment east of Suez?

You will remember Morris, whom you met here during his last visit to England. And as you remember him so he is, with perhaps an added grey hair or two in his moustache, and a few more upon his temples. For the rest, he is just as lean and brown and boyish as he has always been, and with a touch of deference in his first greetings to Esther and me that has survived from the school-days, when he was a comparative nipper, and that he will carry, I suppose, since he is English of the English, until common earth shall level us all. He was looking, when he first came in, rather hesitating and ill at ease, with his title, as it were, tucked awkwardly under his arm. Much like this I have seen him at school, on some Old Boys' Day, coming back to the pavilion after making his century, with an uncomfortable shove at his cap, and something about the bowlers having been "dead off their luck."

Finding us alone however, and not disposed to worry him, he cheered up amazingly, and was soon chattering to us briskly about his various adventures. His personal part in these would seem as a rule to have been conspicuous by its dullness; but the adventures themselves were well worth hearing about. And it was only quite accidentally, as he was leaving for Stoke, that we discovered him to be seconded for some special duties in the colonies—"imperial defence, don't you know, and all that sort of thing; rather an interesting job."

And did I tell you, by the way, that the Poles have bequeathed us their baby during their visit to Italy? Esther has just brought her in, and she is staring at me now with the solemnest eyes in creation—little pools of Siloam, but with the angels just going to be busy. I must go to them, and be healed.

Ever yrs.,
P. H.