volume which contains the hymns, and then I need not trouble Lotta to copy them. Our new hymn-book (for Schools and Colleges, Mr. Farmer's) will contain about two hundred hymns, and I think may very well include ten or twelve Latin ones-among them the Stabat Mater.

I shall look forward to reading your book on the principles of criticism. A very important part of this subject which I have never seen treated is literary evidence-genuineness of books and texts. Another important question little considered is the connexion between a writer and his works. It is much less, I think, than is commonly supposed-Shakespeare, if we could have seen him, would have appeared to us ǎTOπós Tis (an oddity). The writer and the man do not generally correspond. In Goethe and Sir W. Scott they are probably better harmonized than in others.

To MISS C. M. SYMONDS.

BALLIOL COLLEGE,

January 2, 1888.

I write to you partly from an interested and partly from a disinterested motive. The disinterested motive is that I may know how you all are, and yourself especially. I hope, child, that you are getting better and stronger, and are perhaps able to skate and toboggan, without which life at Davos is not considered to be worth having. Tell me also about your father and mother, not forgetting Madge and Katharine.

Now comes the interested part of my letter-the hymnbook is approaching completion; but the Latin hymn-book which your father kindly promised me has never arrived, probably because it was out of print. Therefore I should have a few hymns copied out. Upon his recommendation I should choose:

Now I was going to ask you to copy these out for me, and I am sure you would have told me that you would

have great pleasure in doing so, for which I thank you by anticipation. But I see upon looking back at your father's letter that he only promised to send me the book if I wrote and desired it. Will you ask him then to order the book and the bill to be sent to me, and I will write to him in a few days?

Will you care to hear that I am a great deal better than when I limped after you to the Post Office? I have done a good deal of work at Plato, besides College business; only I cannot sleep well at night, and am therefore very lazy, and often go to bed again after morning Chapel.

I have read some novels lately-probably you have read them already :- Misunderstood, very pretty-Cranford, excellent -Salem Chapel, good but too full of improbabilities—Hurrish, excellent-Erna, a very pretty Norwegian story—All Sorts and Conditions of Men and The Children of Gibeon, both very much alike and equally unsatisfactory. There are few ways in which people can be better employed than in reading a good novel (I do not say that they should do nothing else). If you ever feel out of spirits bury yourself in a novel. A young lady, a friend of mine, has read Sir Charles Grandison three times over and can pass an examination in it. She made me read it; it is the longest of novels and one of the best. I have also read over again The Vicar of Wakefield, which I think charming. I hope that you are well up in it, and remember that the next time we meet I shall examine you in Boswell.

To W. H. HALL.

OXFORD, February 27, 1888.

I am afraid that I only pleased myself with a vision of going to Rome with you in the Easter Vacation. I have at present so many things to do at home that I fear I must give up the pleasant prospect, perhaps for ever.

Here we are embedded in some inches or rather feet of snow, which has been lying on the ground for a fortnight. No such fall has occurred here in my recollection. I picture you to be basking in sunshine, and looking upon the blue

of the Mediterranean. I hope that you will get a sight of Florence and Rome before you return.

The time which I passed at Six Mile Bottom has left a very pleasant recollection. How kind you were to me! I got through a fair portion of my book, which has been my chief object in life.

People are hopeful about the Liberal Unionist policy. I do not think that I am. After all, the great difficulty remains that you have two-thirds of the people of Ireland, supported by more than half the Liberal party in England, clamouring for separation, and though the Government can keep in order the Irish, they cannot keep in order the Irish and the English.

The question turns upon the growth or change of the Liberal party in the next year. On the other hand, I feel that the methods of the Home Rule agitation are detestable, and that a Government does not deserve to be called a Government which does not protect its loyal subjects against boycotting; nor have I the least hope or faith in the future of a self-governed Ireland, a nation of paupers, who will drive out of their country the best elements which it contains.

To MISS M. TENNANT.

February 27, 1888.

How pathetic old love stories are! You go into a drawingroom and see old dowagers, fat, worldly, unshapely, of fifty, sixty, seventy years old, who were once charming,' as the phrase is, and have had their little romance and perhaps married somebody else for money, and you cannot realize that all this affair of love which agitates the young so greatly was going forward with equal activity fifty or a hundred years ago.

I remember a lady, now about sixty-five years [old], very short and fat, but still a nice creature. She used to have a lover (now a person of high station in the Church), and he wrote out a list of her faults; they covered, she said, two sheets of foolscap paper-and though she was young and pretty, this shabby Dean did not marry her after all. However, she got another