conceived and never carried out. These books, already described with all the circumstance of size and shape, of cloth extra and demy 8vo, would in my imagination creep up, ascending the highest heaven of invention, until they took their place beside the noble and glorious shapes of Sappho's lost lyrics and the unwritten Arthuriad of Milton."
It is not fine writing; it is a real passion which has its utterance here. And the passage is not exceptional, although nothing like it has been included in the present collection. At about the same time, Solomon Eagle (or possibly Mr. Squire under his proper name) wrote of Samuel Butler. In a passage in his Notebooks Butler belittles human effort on the ground that so little that is new and worthy can be accomplished. The reviewer broke into so sudden, so brief, and so violent a storm of emotion at this, in a world where the few things which are good are perpetually in danger of destruction or decay, that the page of literary notes became for a moment prophetical in its intensity.
Heaven knows we have enough of solemnity and bitterness and fanaticism pushing their way into the quiet pastures of art. And Heaven, if it is as pleasant a place as I like to think it, probably appreciates the few intelligent critics who can write about life and letters without pleading a cause or impressing us with the futility of art while Great Things are going on. For myself I am pleased with Solomon Eagle's frivolity just as I am pleased by Mr. Squire's puns in his satires. And I am complaining only because the other qualities of those satires are lacking here—I mean the enthusiasm and passion and energy which carry all living things a little step beyond mere interest and amusement.
I do not know by what fault of selection they have been omitted from this book. Perhaps Eagle is a spirit naturally British. Perhaps he is one of those whom he himself describes as "the grotesque Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs and says it looks like a fried egg" because he is really "bolting in terror from the admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world." The original bearer of the name was hardly that; he was "a poor maniac who, during the Great Plague of London, used to run naked through the streets, with a pan of coals of fire on his head, crying, 'Repent, repent!'" The Solomon Eagle of the book neither
