The death of Mr. Shorthouse, which occurred last week, removes
a remarkable figure from the world of letters. His environment and occupation were apparently most adverse to literary labours. He was born and bred in Birmingham, educated at a private school, and went early into business as a manufacturer of sulphuric acid. Yet he found time in his hours of leisure to saturate himself so completely in the literature of the past as to produce perhaps the most remarkable mystical romance of the seventeenth century that we possess. Mr. Shorthouse was already a middle-aged man when he awoke to find himself famous, for "John Inglesant " took him twenty years to write; and he never repeated his initial success, though his later works were all marked by the charm of style which characterised his masterpiece. It is at least arguable that the circumstances of his life were a blessing in disguise, inasmuch as they were unfavourable to rapid, and therefore unfinished, production. One often wishes for a Minister of Letters with full powers to forbid any novel to be published until the author is forty-five.
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