The pleasant art of reasoning about literature on internal evidence
suffers constant discouragement from the presence and activity of
those little people who insist upon "looking it out in the Lexicon."
Their brutal methods will upset in two minutes the nice calculations
of months. Your logic, your taste, your palpitating sense of style,
your exquisite ear for rhythm and cadence--what do these avail against
the man who goes straight to Stationers' Hall or the Parish Register?

"Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail,"

as Mr. Kipling sings. The answer, of course, is that the beauty of
reasoning upon internal evidence lies in the process rather than the
results. You spend a month in studying a poet, and draw some
conclusion which is entirely wrong: within a week you are set right by
some fellow with a Parish Register. Well, but meanwhile you have been
reading poetry, and he has not. Only the uninstructed judge criticism
by its results alone.

If, then, after studying Messrs. Stevenson and Osbourne's _The
Ebb-Tide_ (London: Heinemann) I hazard a guess or two upon its
authorship; and if somebody take it into his head to write out to
Samoa and thereby elicit the information that my guesses are entirely
wrong--why then we shall have been performing each of us his proper
function in life; and there's an end of the matter.

Let me begin though--after reading a number of reviews of the
book--by offering my sympathy to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Very possibly he
does not want it. I guess him to be a gentleman of uncommonly cheerful