manage it excellently. They talk Cambridge "shop" in terms of the
wittiest scholarship. But of the very existence of a world of grown-up
men and women they seem to have no inkling, or, at least, no care.

The problems of J.K.S. are very much more grown-up. You have only to
read _Paint and Ink_ (a humorous, yet quite serious, address to a
painter upon the scope of his art) or _After the Golden Wedding_
(wherein are given the soliloquies of the man and the woman who have
been married for fifty years) to assure yourself that if J.K.S. be not
Calverley's equal, it is only because his mind is vexed with problems
bigger than ever presented themselves to the Cambridge don. To C.S.C.,
Browning was a writer of whose eccentricities of style delicious sport
might be made. J.K.S. has parodied Browning too; but he has also
perpended Browning, and been moulded by him. There are many stanzas in
this small volume that, had Browning not lived, had never been
written. Take this, from a writer to a painter:--

"So I do dare claim to be kin with you,
And I hold you higher than if your task
Were doing no more than you say you do:
We shall live, if at all, we shall stand or fall,
As men before whom the world doffs its mask
And who answer the questions our fellows ask."

Many such lines prove our writer's emancipation from servitude to the
Calverley fetish, a fetish that, I am convinced, has done harm to many
young men of parts. It is pretty, in youth, to play with style as a
puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after
all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.'s emancipation has come
somewhat late; but he has depths in him which he has not sounded yet,