traveller obtains at wayside stations, of conversations with
obviously reticent and even unintelligent persons; they have so
many photogravures of places that are exactly like other places,
and of complacent people in grotesque costumes, like supers in a
play, that one feels the whole thing to be hopelessly superficial
and unreal. Imagine a journalistic foreigner visiting the
University, lunching at the station refreshment-room, hurrying to
half-a-dozen of the best known colleges, driving in a tram through
the main thoroughfares, looking on at a football match,
interviewing a Town Councillor, and being presented to the Vice-
Chancellor--what would be the profit of such a record as he could
give us? What would he have seen of the quiet daily life, the
interests, the home-current of the place? The only books of travel
worth reading are those where a person has settled deliberately in
an unknown place, really lived the life of the people, and
penetrated the secret of the landscape and the buildings.

I wish very much that there was a really good literary paper, with
an editor of catholic tastes, and half-a-dozen stimulating
specialists on the staff, whose duty would be to read the books
that came out, each in his own line, write reviews of appreciation
and not of contemptuous fault-finding, let feeble books alone, and
make it their business to tell ordinary people what to read, not
saving them the trouble of reading the books that are worth
reading, but sparing them the task of glancing at a good many books
that are not worth reading. Literary papers, as a rule, either
review a book with hopeless rapidity, or tend to lag behind too
much. It would be of the essence of such a paper as I have
described, that there should be no delay about telling one what to
look out for, and at the same time that the reviews should be