THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE
than appears on the surface in the casual confession by Mr. A. C. Benson in his lightful volume From a College Window:
The two things I have found to be of infinite service to myself in learning to write prose have been keeping a full diary and writing poetry.
It is interesting to remember in this connection that George Meredith once wrote:
Writing for the stage would be a corrective of a too incrusted scholarly style, into which some great ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers to a definite plan and English.
In other words, in literature as well as in life there are some occasions when the longest way round is the shortest way home, and one of them is the art of acquiring a particular branch of literacy form by the practice of forms that are radically different.
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