‘It was at Arques,’ says Mr. Arthur Symons . . . ’that I had the only serious, almost solemn conversation I ever had with Beardsley.’  You can scarcely believe that any of the conversations between the two were other than serious and solemn, because he approaches Beardsley as he would John Bunyan or Aquinas.  Art, literature and life, are all to this engaging writer a scholiast’s pilgrim’s progress.  Beside him, Walter Pater, from whom he derives, seems almost flippant—­and to have dallied too long in the streets of Vanity Fair.

(1906.)

ENGLISH AESTHETICS.

The law reports in newspapers contain perhaps the only real history of England that has any relation to truth.  Here, too, may be found indications of current thought, more pregnant than the observations of historians.  They still afford material for the future short or longer history of the English people by the John Richard Greens of posterity.  This was brought home to me by perusing two cases reported in the Morning Post, that of Mrs. Rita Marsh and the disputed will of Miss Browne.  I yield to no one in my ignorance of English law, but I have seldom read judgments which seemed so conspicuously unfair, so characteristic of the precise minimum of aesthetic perception in the English people.

The hostelries of Great Britain are famous for their high charges, their badly-kept rooms, and loathsome cooking; let me add, their warm welcome.  In the reign of Edward III. there was legislation on the subject.  The colder and cheaper hospitality of the Continent strikes a chill, I am sometimes told by those familiar with both.  The hotel selected by a certain Mrs. Rita Marsh was no exception to the ordinary English caravanserai.  It was ‘replete with every comfort.’  The garden contained an oubliette, down which Mrs. Marsh, while walking in the evening, inadvertently fell.  On the Continent the oubliettes are inside the house, and you are ostentatiously warned of their immediate neighbourhood.  These things are managed better in France, if I may say so without offending Tariff Reformers.

The accident disfigured Mrs. Marsh for life; and for the loss of unusual personal attractions an English jury awarded her only 500_l_.  The judge made a joke about it.  Mr. Gill was very playful about her photograph, and every one, except, I imagine, Mrs. Marsh, seems to have been satisfied that ample justice was done.  The hotel proprietors did not press their counter-claim for a bill of 191_l_.!  Chivalrous fellows!  Still, I can safely say that in France Mrs. Marsh would have been awarded at least four times that amount; though if she had been murdered the proprietors would have only been fined forty francs.  But beauty to its fortunate possessors is more valuable than life itself, and the story is to me one of the most pathetic I have ever heard.  To the English mind there is something