Messrs. Dent issue a cheap edition of the Letters from
W. II. Hudson to Edward Garnett, and Mr. Garnett has seized the opportunity to deal severely in a new preface with all the critics who found any fault in Hudson. " Critics of such an order of mind," he writes, " cannot take rare and beautiful things in literature simply for what they arc, and be grateful for them. They insist on finding their own faces in the glass of their subject and, turning away displeased, they protest, This is none of I ! ' " A verdict with sonic truth in it, probably ; it seems churlish and conceited ever to engage in strict and proportionate criticism but in the end it conduces more to a just enjoyment of literature to have the virtues and vices of an author clearly in mind than to be sentimentally reverent. Perhaps Mr. Garnett would have done better to keep his polemic over for another occasion. Hudson's letters were lively and amusing at times ; but they were not excep- tionally good, and the letters to Mr. Garnett arc somehow stiffer and more arid than usual.
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