May I follow up this experience of his with one of my own, as a preface or brief apology for this lecture?  Short-lived as is the author’s joy in his critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, mournful his consent with Sir Thomas Browne that ‘there is nothing immortal but immortality,’ he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of business, who in England call themselves ‘Press-Cutting Agencies,’ in America ‘Press-Clipping Bureaux,’ and, as each successive child of his invention comes to birth, unbecomingly presume in him an almost virginal trepidation.  ‘Your book,’ they write falsely, ’is exciting much comment.  May we collect and send you notices of it appearing in the World’s Press?  We submit a specimen cutting with our terms; and are, dear Sir,’ etc.

Now, although steadily unresponsive to this wile, I am sometimes guilty of taking the enclosed specimen review and thrusting it for preservation among the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the book it was written to appraise.  So it happened that having this vacation, to dust—­not to read—­a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, I happened on a review signed by no smaller a man than Mr Gilbert Chesterton and informing the world that the author of my obsolete book was full of good stories as a kindly uncle, but had a careless or impatient way of stopping short and leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted to know:  that, reaching the last chapter, or what he chose to make the last chapter, instead of winding up and telling ’how everybody lived ever after,’ he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular knee with a blessing and the remark that nine o’clock was striking and all good children should be in their beds.

That criticism has haunted me during the vacation.  Looking back on a course of lectures which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting them in print; revising them with all the nervousness of a beginner; I have seemed to hear you complain—­’He has exhorted us to write accurately, appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold and essay Verse.  He has insisted that Literature is a living art, to be practised.  But just what we most needed he has not told.  At the final doorway to the secret he turned his back and left us.  Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity—­these we may achieve.  But where has he helped us to write with beauty, with charm, with distinction?  Where has he given us rules for what is called Style in short?—­having attained which an author may count himself set up in business.’

Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind’s ear I heard you reproaching me.  I beg you to accept what follows for my apology.