the interest which is to

to

literature and journalism. In the present collection there is a connecting thread in recurring allusions to Greek and Latin literature. As these essays are written by one whose scholarship is rusty, and are addressed to "the general reader," they may perhaps serve to illustrate is to be found be found in the ancient classics, even at second-hand, and the relation which should exist between the study of English and of classical literature. It is the object of what is called "The New Teaching advance such study by making the teaching of the classics more literary and less grammatical than heretofore. To those who advocate this movement may I commend, if they do not already know it, the Address which Lord Dufferin delivered at St. Andrews in 1891? Rectorial Addresses are often somewhat jejune exercises. Lord Dufferin's, which I chanced to take up while putting together these essays, is one of the most practical and helpful with which I am acquainted. Nowhere is a more eloquent plea to be found for the study of Greek, and nowhere a more cogent plea, based on personal experience, for the study of it by the "new" method.

I have been much indebted for suggestions and corrections to my brother, Mr. A. M. Cook,

formerly Surmaster of St. Paul's School; but he must not be held responsible for my mistakes or opinions.

It is possible that the present volume may come into the hands of some readers who possess its predecessor. I take this opportunity, therefore, to supply a few footnotes or postscripts to the earlier essays. Some of the points have been given to me by friendly readers or helpful critics. Others occurred to me on chance reading, but too late for inclusion. Authors, like Thackeray's after-dinner speaker, have often to lament that a point only occurred to them" when going away in the cab." My essay on "The Art of Biography" brought me many suggestions about the best biographies in the language. I think, however, that I mentioned most of the books which the general opinion would include in that category. In suggesting a very high place for the Lives of the Norths, however, I might have fortified myself with the opinion of another good judge besides Stevenson. Here is a passage from a letter by J. A. Symonds, printed in Mr. Horatio Brown's Life of him: "By the way, when you spoke of Pepys, I think you might have said a word about

Roger North. I regard his Lives of the Norths and his own Autobiography as remarkable essays in the composition of Memoirs. Jowett used to tell us twenty years ago that, next to Boswell, Roger North was the best biographer in English. Exaggerated, certainly, but the man has some right to a niche."

The mention of Stevenson reminds me that in the essay on "Literature and Modern Journalism I might have added him to my list of Victorian writers who had lampooned the journals to which they used to contribute. "He had set himself," writes Stevenson of a college friend, "to found the strangest thing in our society-one of those periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod."

In "A Study in Superlatives" I raised the question, Which is the worst line in poetry? and gave Professor Tyrrell's selection of a line in Statius. A friendly reader sent me as a rival a line from Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. The

Roman father, before plunging the dagger into Virginia, apostrophises her thus:

And now, mine own dear little girl, there is no way but this. It would not be easy to beat this as an example of comic bathos. I note that Mr. Drinkwater, in the able introductions contributed to the last volume of Mr. Humphry Ward's selections from The English Poets, has chanced to engage in this amusing game. Horne's Orion "would be a fruitful ground," he says, "for the anthologist of the flattest lines in poetry," and he gives us this example :

His friends Orion left

His further preparations to complete.

Another line which may be entered for the competition is quoted by Mr. Drinkwater from Alexander Smith:

My heart is in the grave with her,
The family went abroad.

Other of Mr. Ward's contributors are candid friends of the poets whom they introduce, and Mr. Bailey calls our attention to this "abomination of hideousness" in Meredith:

Love meet they who do not shove
Cravings in the van of Love.

But as for the flattest lines in English poetry,

b

searchers generally turn to Wordsworth, and fasten on lines such as this from "The Thorn":

And to the left three yards beyond;

or this from "Simon Lee":

For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell;

or these from "The Sailor's Mother" :

And I have been as far as Hull to see

What clothes he might have left or other property;1

or this from the piece addressed "To the Spade of a Friend":

Spade with which Wilkinson hath tilled his land. Such exercises, however, are unprofitable, for the removal of the context is unfair to Wordsworth. But Wilkinson has been a stone of stumbling even to genuine admirers of the poet. It will be remembered that Tennyson and FitzGerald once engaged in a competition to make "the weakest Wordsworthian line imaginable," and the line to which they gave the palm was this:

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.

1 So the lines stood when first published. They were ultimately revised thus:

And I have travelled weary miles to see

If aught which he had owned might still remain for me.