I AM not given to the use of postscripts, but I indulged myself with one in the last letter I wrote to you. It reminds me of the only bon mot to which I can lay claim. When I was about six years old, my mother and I were visiting an aunt of mine, and, one evening, my mother read aloud to my aunt a letter she had just received. It was lengthy, and no doubt interesting to the two ladies, while the contents were probably beyond my comprehension. “Little pigs have long ears,” and I noticed that, at the conclusion of the letter, my mother read “P.S.,” and then some final sentences. Immediately afterwards I was ordered to bed, and, once there, my mother came to see me. My small mind was full of this new idea, and I was thirsting for information as to the meaning of these mysterious letters. Therefore, when my mother had bid me good night and was going away, I said, “Mother, what does P.S. mean; is it Parting Subject?” She smiled and said, “No, the letters stand for post scriptum, but the meaning is not very different.” She afterwards helped me to wrestle with the Latin grammar, and in time I arrived at the exact translation of post scriptum, but my childish rendering of P.S. would do just as well. I was made to bitterly regret having ever suggested it; for, when my proud mother told the story, my various brothers and sisters, separately and collectively, insisted that some one had told me to say it, and I am not sure that they did not, each in turn, give me a thrashing to impress upon me the vice of “trying to be sharp.” When children have brothers and sisters, their schooling begins early and lasts a long time—fortunately for themselves and the world at large.

That, however, has nothing to do with the matter I was going to write about. I suppose you sometimes look through those galleries of garments which begin and end ladies’ journals, just as I occasionally glance at the advertisements of new books, which I find at the end of a modern novel. The other day I was idly turning over the pages of such a series of advertisements (each page devoted to one book, and quotations from the newspaper reviews of it), and I could not help noticing how, in the case of every book, if not in every critique, the author was compared with some well-known writer—Dickens, Thackeray, George Meredith, Zola, Ibsen, De Maupassant—it does not seem to matter who it is, so long as it is some one. As for Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a writer who mentions India, China, Japan, Siam, the French or Dutch Indies, or any place within two or three thousand miles of them, is certain to find himself compared with the astonishingly talented author of “Soldiers Three,” “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” and a dozen other tales that had made Mr. Kipling famous in India years before his name had been heard in the West.

I know that whenever we visit a new place, we have a ridiculous desire to compare it with some totally different spot that is familiar to us; and I suppose we make the comparison, either because we want to show that we have been somewhere and seen something, or because we are so devoid of ideas or language to express them, that this comparison is our only means of description. Like London, only bigger; Petersburg in winter, but not so cold; bluer than the Mediterranean, and so on. It seems to imply poverty of resource; but if to help readers to realise the appearance of a spot in New Zealand, that place is compared with the Carse of Stirling, the information is not of much use to those who do not know their Scotland.

Is it the same with literary critics? Hardly, I fancy; because even though they write easily of Lake Toba, the Thibetan highlands, or more or less known writers, it can’t give them any real satisfaction, for their own names are but seldom disclosed.

Enlightened people who attend places of Christian worship, often wish that the occupant of the pulpit would read a sermon by some great divine, rather than stumble through an original discourse, which possibly arouses only the scorn, the resentment, or the pity of his hearers. The preacher who is conscious of his own want of eloquence, or realises that the spring of his ideas trickles in the thinnest and most uncertain of streams, may seek to improve his language, or replenish his own exhausted stock of subjects, by studying the sermons of abler men. I doubt if he is greatly to be blamed. Some illustrious writers have won renown after a diligent study of the works of dead authors, and a suggestion of the style of a famous master may be observable in the work of his admirer; just as a modern painter may, consciously or unconsciously, follow the methods, the composition, or the colour schemes of a genius who has given his name to a school of imitators. It would, however, be a little unreasonable to compare all play-writers with Shakespeare, all essayists with Macaulay. If there is nothing new under the sun, two or more men or women, contemporaries, may have the same ideas on a given subject without either being open to a charge of plagiarism. They may express the same ideas differently, or put different ideas in somewhat the same style of language: both may have drawn inspiration from a more or less original source, not generally known or quoted—in all these cases comparisons may be, and often are, simply inept. Some subjects are not yet entirely exhausted, and while it is interesting to compare the different views of recognised authorities, it is annoying to both writers and readers to find that the highest flight of criticism of a new work seems often to consist in mentioning the names of other writers on the same subject—as though it were, in a sense, their personal property, or they had some vested interest in it, by reason of discovery or continual harping on that particular theme. I suppose reviewers, except in a few instances, have no time to really read the books they criticise, and judge them on their merits; but, if they could, it would be more satisfactory to possible readers, who, as things are, can form very little opinion of what a book contains, its relative value or worthlessness, from statements like this, which purports to be an extract from a review in a leading London paper:—

“The opening chapters have a savour of Dickens; the climax is almost Zolaesque.”