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ticularly active at this moment. In any place where writers are gathered together you hear scraps of conversation like this—"I'm going next month—Oh, I'm not going until the autumn—Brown comes back in June—Smith writes to say he is staying a month longer"; and the United States is to be understood in each of these sentences. Sometimes you welcome our mistakes just as we begin to find them out; and then an American boom seems only the prelude to an English slump. At other times you give to a deserving author not only the recognition, which perhaps he has received here, but also the material rewards of which we are much more sparing but which the best of authors both deserves and requires. Again there are curious gaps in your appreciation. Why is it that with you Mr. Chesterton seems to have only a small success and Mr. Belloc hardly any success at all? No doubt there is somewhere a reason for this; but I cannot discover it. At any rate I think the discussion of this question and of those I have temerariously approached above makes, in however small a degree, for international understanding and the advancement of the cause of good letters.

There are few events of real importance to be chronicled in English literary affairs. The Letters of Henry James, I hear, have just appeared. They were eagerly awaited. Mr. Conrad's new novel, which, when it appeared in serial form, could not properly be judged, is awaited in the expectation that it will definitely establish him as one of the greatest of our writers. Among the younger authors, Mr. Robert Nichols has announced a volume of poems entitled Aurelia and Mr. Aldous Huxley another called Lada. Mr. Nichols' book will, I am certain, show a very great advance on the collection which made more of a stir three years ago than perhaps was warranted by the actual performance which it contained. The long narrative poem which gives the title to Mr. Huxley's book has already appeared and is a beautiful piece of work; but I am inclined to doubt whether Mr. Huxley's talents, which are great, are really those of a poet. The Poet Laureate has published his first book in that capacity, a collection of autumnal beauty, fitly called October. On the rest of the front, all is quiet.