heard him lecture, but should imagine that he was an ideal University Extension lecturer.  I do not mean this to be in the least complimentary to him as a critic.  His book, “Illustrations Tennyson,” was an entirely sterile exercise proving on every page that the author had no real perceptions about literature.  It simply made creative artists laugh.  They knew.  His more recent book on modern tendencies displayed in an acute degree the characteristic inability of the typical professor to toddle alone when released from the leading-strings of tradition.

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I fear that most of our professors are in a similar fix.  There is Professor George Saintsbury, a regular Albert Memorial of learning.  In my pensive moments I have sometimes yearned to know as many facts about literature as Professor Saintsbury knows, though he did once, I am told, state that “Wuthering Heights” was written by Charlotte. (That must have been a sadly shocking day for Mr. Clement Shorter!) I have found his Liebig “History of French Literature” very useful; it has never failed to inform me what I ought to think about the giants of the past.  More important, Professor Saintsbury’s critical introductions to the whole series of Dent’s English edition of Balzac are startlingly just.  Over and over again he hits the nail on the head and spares his finger.  I have never understood by what magic he came to accomplish these prefaces.  For the root of the matter is no more in Professor Saintsbury than it was in Churton Collins.  He has not comprehended what he was talking about.  The proof—­his style and his occasional pronouncements on questions as to which he has been quite free to make up his mind all by himself!

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I remember one evening discussing the talents of a certain orchestral conductor, who also played the violin.  I was talking to a member of his orchestra, a very genuine artist.  We agreed that he had conducted badly; but, I said in his defence, “Anyhow his intentions are good.  You must admit that he has a feeling for music.”  “My dear fellow,” exclaimed the bandsman pettishly, “no one who had any feeling for music could possibly stand the d——­d row that that chap makes on the fiddle.”  I was silenced.  I recall this episode in connexion with Professor Saintsbury.  No one who had any feeling for literature could possibly put down the ——­ style that Professor Saintsbury commits.  His pen could not be brought to write it.  Professor Saintsbury may be as loudly positive as he likes—­his style is always quietly whispering:  “Don’t listen.”  As to his modern judgments—­well for their own sakes professors of literature ought to bind themselves by oaths never to say anything about any author who was not safely dead twenty years before they were born.  Such an ordinance would at any rate ensure their dignity.

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