intermittent! There is so much territory through which it does not flow.
A young friend of mine who takes his world through his pores, little experienced in literary exploration, unable to discover the spring, announced to me, after a brush with the "wits," that the essays are "dry." He is mistaken. A Shelburne essay is not infrequently, however, astonishingly difficult. Mr. More has not attended to the technique of ingratiation by which a master of popularity plays upon an unready public with his personality, flattering, cajoling, seducing it to accept his shadow before his substance arrives. He takes so little pains, I will not say to be liked but to be comprehended, that I sometimes wonder whether he has ever broadly considered the function of criticism—in a democracy as different as ours is from that in Athens. He writes as if unaware that our General Reading Public is innocent of all knowledge of the best that has been said and thought in the world. He writes at least half the time as if he contemplated an audience of Trents, Coleridges, Johnsons, and Casaubons.
Let me illustrate. Occasionally he will give you some paragraph of literary history as plain as a biographical dictionary and as dry as, let us say in deference to Mr. Mencken, as dry as a professor of English. But of a sudden, in a harmless-looking essay, say that on the eighteenth century dilettante, William Beckford, you, if a plain man, stumble and
