"ANIMAL SPIRITS."
No. VIII.—After the Influenza.
LETTERS FROM THE SHADES.
Have just perused report of Commission on Library Wall-flowers. Appears that enterprising book-shop, resort of fashionable world for past century, has sent round urgent whip to Representative Men of Letters (and also Mr. Le Gallienne) asking for short list of best neglected books. Find that answers cover fairly wide ground, from Homer to New English Dictionary. Feeling that it might please general public to have some expression of opinion from various defunct authors described with faint praise as undeservedly neglected, and finding it inconvenient to arrange personal interview, by reason of distance and other difficulties, have sent out circular requesting that they would interview themselves on the subject and kindly let me have result. Some answered evasively through secretaries. Subj in small assortment from letters of those who responded frankly:—
Homer obliges with a few Hexameters.
Lo! in the hollows of Hades I hear the lamenting of Lubbock,
Bart., who declares that Homerus (or somebody else of the same name,
One or the other, or both, or perhaps a collection of poets)—
Lubbock, I say, who declares that the sale of my poems is paltry,
Says he is sorry to see me reduced to the state of a wall-flower!
But as a matter of fact I have got an immense circulation,
Chiefly in Oxford and Cambridge and Eton and other palæstræ.
Sophocles pushes me close, but Pindar is out of the running,
Being a bit too stiff, though the cost is defrayed by the parents.
As for the rest, I consider Herodotus very deserving;
Quaintly enough at this moment I see he is writing about me,
Writing to say he considers Homerus exceedingly clever.
Who, by the way, is a Mr. Le Gallienne? He, as they tell me,
Prattles a lot on his private affairs for the good of the public.
Herodotus forwards a trifling Brochure.