but for a Professor of Poetry the choice of any one of them would be simply frivolous. The simplest way of dealing with the contemporary writers of belles-lettres is to divide them into two classes: the Gentleman in a Library, and the earnest Liberal. Neither is quite what we want.
The Gentleman in a Library is well read, and has a taste for books. In his highest form of development he is a genuine scholar, with considerable acuteness, and a vigorous gusto for literature. His highest manifestation in England is Professor Saintsbury. Mr Saintsbury is a scholar: and he knows a great deal about Port (his Notes for a Cellarbook are inadequate on the side of German wines). His services to literature have been great: had he done nothing but his edition of Caroline Poets in three volumes he would still have earned our perpetual gratitude. What is singular about his criticism is the range of his enjoyment: he enjoys not only the first, but the second, third, and tenth-rate, without confusion or illusions. If there is the smallest mustard seed of pleasure to be found in some forgotten poet or novelist, Mr Saintsbury will extract it. Consequently, Mr Saintsbury is often more entertaining when he writes about authors whom we do not want to read, than when he writes about authors whom we know. Things which we are incapable of enjoying for ourselves we enjoy through Mr Saintsbury.
The second Gentleman in a Library is Mr Charles Whibley. I also prize Mr Whibley because he has read so many things that I have not read, and because he is not a Whig. His great limitation, in contrast to Mr Saintsbury, is his affection for quaintness; he is a disciple of Henley and was a friend of George Wyndham. On the other hand, I do not know who else could write about Bolingbroke.
I think that these are the two best specimens: there are many varieties. As the gentleman becomes the journalist, we get essays in the C. Lamb tradition; as he becomes the theologian, we get, with pomposity and pretence, Mr, or rather the late Mr A. J. and now Earl Balfour. Social ambitions, again, produce the literary chatterbox. The gentleman turned professor produces works of sometimes useful and sometimes useless scholarship. I recognize in Mr A. C. Bradley some of the acuteness of his greater brother, but whereas Appearance and Reality is a fine work of art, Four Plays of Shakespeare strikes me as a needless luxury. Professor Mackail wrote a History of Latin Literature which was the first incentive to at least one boy to read Latin poetry; but Mr Mackail, a belated pre-
