The Late Stephen Gwynn
SIR,—Does Janus quite do justice to Stephen Gwynn, one who, by the way, was working for the Spectator more than fifty years ago, in the days of " old Mr. Hutton," as he generally called him ? Gwynn's most frequent subjects were Ireland and France, for whose people and .country and wine he had a lifelong love ; In Praise of France is a good deal more than readable. But his best work surely was done as an essayist (Garden Wisdom and For Second Reading) and as a poet. Gwynn himself thought his little volume, Collected Poems, published in 1923, to be his best work : and indeed The Queen's Chronicler is a lovely thing. And his fascinating autobiography, Reminiscences of a Literary Man, has only one fault, that it ends with his election to Parliament in 1906. Janui mentions none of these things—only biographies and dissipation of talent.
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