essays need little explanation, but occasionally they may require excuse. I should perhaps make a formal excuse for including in a collected edition of my essays George Radford's "Falstaff," but I cannot bring myself to part company with it. Many of my oldest friends have often told me that they like it better than the others, and whether I have agreed with them or not I have always found it pleasanter to read than any of my own. Lady Radford has given me her permission so to include it. AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. THE PIGHTLe, SheringhAM, October 1922. NOTE.-The few papers to which an asterisk is attached have never before been collected. The Rectorial Address was published at the time by Mr. Humphreys of "Hatchards"," and the Address on John Bright by Mr. Fisher Unwin. I JOHN MILTON T is now more than sixty years ago since Mr. Carlyle took occasion to observe, in his Life of Schiller, that, except the Newgate Calendar, there was no more sickening reading than the biographies of authors. Allowing for the vivacity of the comparison, and only remarking, with reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its compilers have usually been very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy and happy expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh seeming as if it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in ill-living and scandalous mortals. Though few things, even in what is called Literature, are more disgusting than to hear small critics, who earn their bite and sup by acting as the self-appointed showmen of the works of their betters, heaping terms of moral opprobrium upon those whose genius is, if not exactly a lamp unto our feet, at all events a joy to our hearts, still, not even genius can repeal the Decalogue, or re-write the sentence of doom, "He which is filthy, let him be filthy still." It is therefore permissible to wish that some of our great authors had been better men. |