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of the letter R with a guttural growl. "That's the dog's letter," as Shakespeare says.' And yet he saw clearly enough that English life, with its hunting and its soldiering and its literature, would still go on, and prove 'far more substantial' than the intrigues of Party Politics or the more grasping dreams of Socialism. What, then, would he have done in what seemed to him a disjointed world? He had many projects, half thought out, in his busy mind. There was a life of Bolingbroke which he had reserved for his age, and though Bolingbroke lay far out in the wilds of the eighteenth century, which was no century for him, the modern half of his soul sympathised warmly with Bolingbroke's ideals of a patriot king and a contented people. And there was his estate to manage and to restore to the prosperity which it had enjoyed two hundred years or more before. In a letter, one of the last he wrote, which was actually delivered to Mr. Wilfrid Ward after his death, he admitted that he was absorbed in two subjects: 'Rural England and his library.' Truly they were subjects worthy to absorb him. It was not for him to shirk the duties of the countryside, and the beautiful library at Clouds, already fashioned to his will, was fast being filled with beautiful books. ""We know what we are, but we do not know what we may be," he told Mr. Ward. 'I may— perhaps take office again. But I doubt it. Inveni portum.' Had he? Even if he had found a harbour, it was still restless with the swell of the ocean. His eager mind was discovering new duties, not discarding old ones. Some people inherit an estate,' he wrote in the letter to Mr. Ward, from which I have already quoted, and go on as if nothing had happened. I can't do that.

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Suddenly I find myself responsible for farming two thousand four hundred acres, and for paying sums that stagger me by way of weekly wages and repairs. So I ask myself "What are you going to do?" I mean to use all my imagination and energy to get something done that should last and remind.' That he would have done that is certain. He would have done that and much more besides. Had the call come, he would, I believe, have returned with fresh vigour to politics, in spite of partisan intrigues and the selfishness of Socialism. The gentry of England must not abdicate,' he had said, and he would not have abdicated. A year after his death came the war, which he had long foreseen and pondered, and the war would have aroused him in a moment from his pleasant dreams of fields and books. Assuredly he would have played his part in the defence of his native land, and I think that it would not be displeasing to him that his essays in the art of letters should be gathered together and given to the world in this year of England's gallantry and high endeavour.

CHARLES WHIBLEY.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The Springs of Romance in the Literature of Europe was delivered, as Lord Rector's Address, to the students of the University of Edinburgh in October 1910, and was published as a pamphlet in the same year. The Poetry of the Prison' made its first appearance in The New Review, March 1895. 'Ronsard and the Pléiade' served as a preliminary essay to selected translations from their poetry, published in 1906. 'North's Plutarch' formed an introduction to the reprint of North's version in W. E. Henley's series of Tudor Translations, 1895. The Poems of Shakespeare' appeared in 1898 as a preface to an edition of the Poems. Elizabethan Adventure in Elizabethan Literature' was contributed to The Fortnightly Review in November 1898. And Sir Walter Scott was a speech, proposing the Toast of Honour, delivered at the Fourteenth Annual Dinner of The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club' on November 29, 1907. It was published separately in 1908.

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