around boasting to your friends, if you have any, that this work was
not condemned, derided, and dismissed by your sincere well-wisher,
WREXFORD CRIPPS.


LETTER TO MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT UNSEATED AT GENERAL ELECTION.

DEAR MR. POBSBY-BURFORD,
Though I am myself an ardent Tory, I cannot but rejoice in the
crushing defeat you have just suffered in West Odgetown. There are
moments when political conviction is overborne by personal sentiment;
and this is one of them. Your loss of the seat that you held is the
more striking by reason of the splendid manner in which the northern
and eastern divisions of Odgetown have been wrested from the Liberal
Party. The great bulk of the newspaper-reading public will be puzzled
by your extinction in the midst of our party's triumph. But then, the
great mass of the newspaper-reading public has not met you. I have.
You will probably not remember me. You are the sort of man who would
not remember anybody who might not be of some definite use to him.
Such, at least, was one of the impressions you made on me when I met
you last summer at a dinner given by our friends the Pelhams. Among
the other things in you that struck me were the blatant pomposity of
your manner, your appalling flow of cheap platitudes, and your hoggish
lack of ideas. It is such men as you that lower the tone of public
life. And I am sure that in writing to you thus I am but expressing
what is felt, without distinction of party, by all who sat with you in
the late Parliament.

The one person in whose behalf I regret your withdrawal into private
life is your wife, whom I had the pleasure of taking in to the