academic cottagers, we journalistic occupants of three-rooms-and-a-bath—let us be thankful for an intellectual capitalist or so with means and inclination to entertain these shadowy ambassadors from other ages, and so to establish for our undistinguished democratic society fruitful and inspiring relations with the deathless grand monde of antiquity.
If W. D. Howells was the dean of our fiction, Mr. More is the bishop of our criticism. His classical and Oriental scholarship, his reverence for tradition, his reasoned conservatism, his manner, a little austere at first contact, and his style, pure and severely decorous, all become the office. By the serenity of his pleasure in letters and the life of the mind he recalls those substantially happy old churchmen-scholars of the eighteenth century, Warton and Percy and Warburton; by the range of his deep and difficult reading he suggests Coleridge, to whose intellectual dissoluteness, however, his intellectual organization and concentration are antithetical; by his aloofness from the spirit of the hour and its controversies he reminds one of Landor, striving with none, because none is worth his strife; by his touch of mystic ardor and his sustained moral intensity and philosophic seriousness, he belongs with Savonarola and the great French ecclesiastics of the seventeenth century. One may visualize him in these later years, since his retirement from editorial duties, as sitting in external and internal placidity
