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A prize, consisting of a copy of Books of To-Day and Books of To-Morrow, will be awarded for the best shot.

MR. BENSON’S ‘PATER.’

In no other country has mediocrity such a chance as in England.  The second-rate writer, the second-rate painter meets with an almost universal and immediate recognition.  When good mediocrities die, if they do not go straight to heaven (from a country where the existence of Purgatory is denied by Act of Parliament), at least they run a very fair chance of burial in Westminster Abbey.  ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonus,’ in the shape of royalties, is the real test by which we estimate the authors who have just passed away.  A few of our great writers—­Ruskin and Tennyson, for example—­have enjoyed the applause accorded to senility by a people usually timid of brilliancy and strength, when it is contemporary.  The ruins of mental faculties touch our imagination, owing, perhaps, to that tenderness for antiquity which has preserved for us the remains of Tintern Abbey.  Seldom, however, does a great writer live to find himself, in the prime of his literary existence, a component part of English literature.  Yet there are happy exceptions, and not the least of these was Walter Pater.

His inclusion in the English Men of Letters series, so soon after his death, somewhat dazzled the reviewers.  Mr. Benson was complimented on a daring which, if grudgingly endorsed, is treated as just the sort of innovation you would expect from the brother of the author of Dodo.  ’To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only an age of small souls,’ says Swinburne, and the presence of Pater, which rose so strangely beside our waters, seemed to many of his contemporaries only the last sob of a literature which they sincerely believed came to an end with Lord Macaulay.

It was a fortunate chance by which Mr. A. C. Benson, one of our more discerning critics, himself master of no mean style, should have been chosen as commentator of Pater.  Among the plutarchracy of the present day a not very pretty habit prevails of holding a sort of inquest on deceased writers—­a reaction against misplaced eulogy—­tearing them and their works to pieces, and leaving nothing for reviewers or posterity to dissipate.  From the author of the Upton Letters we expect sympathy and critical acumen.  It is needless to say we are never disappointed.  His book is not merely about a literary man:  it is a work of literature itself.  So it is charming to disagree with Mr. Benson sometimes, and