Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he succeeded passably well until after forty years of age.  But then the spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie open to the scourge.  Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set them down under the title of “Trivia,” and now at length we are enriched by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, whimsical, and merciless sense of humour.  It is a motion picture of a middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately intellectual brainslide of our generation.

This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat.  Mr. Smith is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life, tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness which amounts to a spiritual virginity.  He comes to us trailing clouds of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our home.  He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour.  He is a flicker of absolute Mind.  His little book is as precious and as disturbing as devilled crabs.

Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from mind to mind, leaping—­a shy and shining spark—­from brain to brain!  I know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit.  A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked!  Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm—­all this is “Trivia.”  Where are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old time?  Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy elfin scamper.  It is Atalanta’s heels.  It is a heaven-given scenario of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences—­the mind of a strolling bachelor.

Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought of all hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away.  “These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”