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WAR AND THE

and reading him for the pleasure of it. Nay, there are excellent folk who would say, if they dared to speak the truth, that they preferred a good novelette before all that Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Wordsworth have written.

Now the tone-deaf and the colour-blind and those who are unable to distinguish one flavour from another evidently cannot help themselves; and I wonder how far this is true of the people who find "Lycidas" a bore? Could these, by submitting to the dogmas of the Church of Letters, and by doing their very best to discern the beauties that were pointed out to them, come at last to appreciate these beauties? I suppose that the answer is, some could, and others couldn't. There must be many people, it seems probable, who are born without the sense of literature, who are