was engaged upon Frederick the Great.' When he was no longer equal to horse exercise we took long walks together round and round the parks, and on one occasion, all of a sudden, à propos of nothing, he began slowly to pay out for my benefit an extemporary biography of Lord Chatham, the most wonderful soliloquy to which I ever listened. I have been shown over Venice by Mr. Ruskin as cicerone in his own gondola. It is interesting to remember that the architectural decoration to which he specially called attention in most cases dated from the Renaissance. The spirit (so he explained) in which these men worked was not the highest; but their artistic execution was perfection itself. I was introduced by Mr. Robert Browning to Waring, a sad disenchantment, when the hero of the inimitable poem had become a weary-looking old man like any other. I was present at a family dinner where Thackeray discoursed to a delighted audience of young people about 'The Virginians,' which he was then writing, and which seemed to fill his mind to the exclusion of everything else. Among other matters, he asked us, all round the table, what was the widest jump any of us had ever known, and when we agreed upon twentyone feet, he said: Then I must make George Washington jump one foot more.' That was in 1858; and in 1908, just fifty years afterwards, I dined next to Mr. Rudyard Kipling in the Hall at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the evening of the day when the University made him a Doctor of Laws.

6

Fifty years is a long space of time; but my indirect connexion with English literature is older still. I suppose I will not be so prudish as to say that I fear-that there are few or none here present who have not read the Reeve's Tale of the poet Chaucer. That story tells how two young scholars of Cambridge went out to the Mill at Trumpington, and behaved there in a manner in which I am sure that no Cambridge scholar would dream of behaving now. The most audacious of this pair of scapegraces was called Alain de Strother; and Chaucer says that he came from a town so far in the North that he could not tell where it was situated. Now, the Alain de Strother of Chaucer's day was a great landowner, who lived at Wallington, in Northumberland, the very same home where I live now. Beyond any doubt he must have been a friend and crony of Chaucer at the Court of the Plantagenets; and the poet, when he borrowed his story from Boccaccio, must have given the name of Alain de Strother to the principal character by way of a specimen of medieval chaff.

This is the first public dinner, on anything like this scale, which is representative of all the three classes in the great hierarchy of book-producers and book-distributors; and the idea of it, like many other profitable, and some pleasant, ideas, has come to us from America. The booksellers are here, and the publishers; and the publishers as I learn from my letter of invitation, in an old-fashioned phrase, which was good to read-have brought their authors' with them. This company comprises the three classes without whose active, intelligent, and friendly co-operation literature would be in a very bad way indeed; and I will say a few words in reference to each of these classes, beginning with that to which I myself belong. There are present here many writers with whose names I am well acquainted, and whose works I read and admire; although I am sadly conscious that it is impossible for an older generation to read the books of younger men with the same insight and sympathy as they are read by their own contemporaries. A man's co-evals are the best judges of his work; and, for my own part, I take care never to imitate those wiseacres who, forty years ago, and fifty years ago, used to go all over London blethering about Robert Browning's obscurity, and Ruskin's inconsistency, and the impertinence of boys like Millais and Holman Hunt in laying on brighter colours than those which were used by their elders. I remember once venturing to mention Mr. Carlyle to an ancient diner-out, who passed for a high literary authority. 'Carlyle!' he said. 'Odious fellow! he interlards Cromwell's speeches with his own nonsensical comments.' As if any human being, other than a professional historian, can now be found who reads Cromwell's speeches except for the sake of Carlyle's interpolations and exclamations!

It is when we come to works of the imagination that I feel my incompetence to speak for literature. I cannot even conceive -to mention authors who, happily, are still alive among us-the conditions under which are produced such masterpieces as Swinburne's 'Hymn to Proserpine'; or William Watson's sonnets and ballads; or Meredith's Egoist'; or 'The Aspern Papers,' and the 'Madonna of the Future,' of Mr. Henry James; or that exquisite little piece of fancy by Mr. Rudyard Kipling which is entitled The Best Story in the World.' In these matters of inspiration the wind bloweth where it listeth; and I am not one of those who can explain or account for it. I was born and bred, but I have not permanently resided, in Arcadia. I spent the best thirty

years of my life in the House of Commons, where we do not deal with imagination, except, perhaps, in our estimate of the motives of our opponents, and the value of our own attempts at eloquence. And yet in the House of Commons, as in the Senates of all famous nations, there is an alliance between politics and the more solid -and, it may be, the more stolid-departments of literature. It was so in ancient Rome, where eminent public men were always reading, and dictating, and jotting down their thoughts, at the banquet and in the bath, on board ship, and in their travelling litters. They were perpetually writing; and some of them, it must be admitted, wrote very badly. I seem to recall a stanza by Mr. Matthew Arnold on that very subject, which runs somewhat thus:

In his cool hall, in studious plight,

The Roman noble sat;

But, though he held his style upright,
His style was very flat.

The season at which fragments of literature are at an immense premium in politics is at the approach of a General Election. I remember how, on such an occasion, when Sir Henry CampbellBannerman was starting on a speaking tour in Scotland, he said to his colleagues, as he made his way to the door along the Treasury Bench: 'Good-bye! I'm off to my constituents. It is a case of half-a-crown for a joke, and ten shillings for a Scriptural allusion.'

But, speaking seriously, there is one province of literature which is very closely allied to politics. The period which an historian spends in Parliament, however long that period may be, is never wasted. There he learns, as he can learn nowhere else, the cardinal cruth that great political events generally are caused, and always are accompanied, by great passions and great emotions; and that an historical representation of a national crisis, which is cold and lifeless, may have important merits of its own, but can be no true picture. Ah! gentlemen, the golden age of the historian, in every sense of the word, was the third quarter of the Eighteenth Century, when Doctor Robertson got four thousand five hundred pounds for his' Charles the Fifth,' as well as a gold snuff-box from that estimable potentate, the Empress Catherine of Russia. In those halcyon days peers and landowners, all our island over, kept their libraries as well supplied as their cellars and their ice-houses ; and they never hesitated about paying down their two guineas, or three guineas, for a bulky quarto; whereas in our time smart

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people, and people who want to be thought smart, buy, not books, but motors. And again, the historian in old days was free from other forms of persecution which now beset a well-meaning writer who aspires to please, as well as to instruct, his public. If Gibbon was alive now he would be told by one critic that he had not studied his authorities in the original manuscript, or paid sufficient attention to recent discoveries in archæological research; and another critic would inform him that history has nothing to say to morality, and that, instead of calling Marcus Aurelius a virtuous ruler, and Commodus an odious tyrant, he ought to have recounted the bare facts relating to them in unadorned language, and have left questions of right and wrong alone. What a notion is this of converting history into an arid science, and divorcing it from the study of human character and human conduct! Where else, I should like to know, can the men of later times learn to avoid the errors which are fatal to the prosperity, and even to the existence, of nations, if not from the story, told as a true historian tells it, of the follies and faults, the wisdom, the heroism, and the self-sacrifices of the past?

I earnestly trust that there is no one here who looks to me for suggestions and proposals about the organisation of the book trade. You could not have selected a less likely man for that purpose. I have not even any remark to make about the great controversy which has so long occupied the thoughts of so many here present; except that I unfeignedly hope that all difficulties have now been arranged to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. If there is to be war in the Balkans (which Heaven avert !), at all events let there be peace on Mount Parnassus. There is no more peaceable, and entirely and placidly contented, citizen than myself in all the republic of literature. I was brought up from a child among those who were book-lovers, but not bookworms; and I felt among books, in the words of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,' as a stable-boy feels among horses, or (to use a simile which comes nearer home to me) as a gamekeeper's son feels among setters and retrievers. I delight in all the details of the most delightful among callings. I receive proof sheets with a hearty welcome, and send them away with unfeigned reluctance. I love book-lists and book-plates and book-covers. But, above all, I love a bookshop-the interior, if I can find an excuse for entering the door, or, at the very least, the rows of open volumes displayed in the window. Of all places of business they are the most attractive,

and not on account of their shop-wares only. Nowhere does the spirit of courtesy and essential refinement more universally prevail than among those who are engaged, in any capacity, in the business of books. A visit to a leading book-mart, in London or in the provinces, is always made a treat for a civil-spoken author-a treat tempered only by the feeling that he would gladly see more of his own productions lying on the counter. I have known booksellers-though never, perhaps, publishers-who had a stern and formidable exterior aspect; but the terrors were all on the surface. Some thirty years ago I was in Mr. Quaritch's shop in Piccadilly; and after a while Mr. Quaritch himself issued from his inner sanctum and began a conversation. 'I knew your uncle,' he said. 'He used to come here a great deal. He was a very common sort of bookbuyer; he always bought to read.' But there was a twinkle in his eye as he spoke; and he went on to tell me how one of his two most valuable clients always knew the contents of every book that he purchased, and that client was the late Lord Crawford and Balcarres.

And then with regard to the publisher. I am pretty deeply read in what has been written during the last two hundred years about the natural antagonism between publishers and authors; nor am I one of those who lightly abandon any time-honoured jest. But my own experience, and my observation, so far as it extends, of the experience of others, has led me to pleasant and satisfactory conclusions about the most important of those relationships which exist in the family of letters. The literature of the ages, ancient and modern alike, would indeed be poorer if the correspondence between the men who wrote books, and the men who gave them to the world, had never seen the light. Atticus was Cicero's nearest friend, and he was his publisher likewise an easy business when all that was required was to set half a hundred slaves writing for their lives in making copies of the 'De Officiis,' or the 'Orations against Catiline.' What story, in any language, surpasses in interest the letters of Lord Byron to John Murray? What a picture they afford, on the side of the older man, of wise and honest good-will, and of untiring patience and forbearance; and on the part of the younger man, what an outpouring of wit, and vigour, and vitality! Nor can I forget that there are those present in this room who are united by an old family connexion, more prolonged than any recorded in literary history-a connexion never clouded with suspicion, never