Well, Gosse, would you like to know what I think of Churton Collins? I think he's a Louse on the Locks of Literature.

Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it, A barbarous people, Blind to the magic, And deaf to the melody, Snarl'd at and cursed me. A demon vext me, The light…

This laurel greener from the brows Of him that uttered nothing base.

O young Mariner, You from the haven Under the sea-cliff, You that are watching The gray Magician With eyes of wonder, I am Merlin, And I am dying, I am Merlin …

'I'm an owl; you're another. Sir Critic, good day.' And the barber kept on shaving.

Ernest Bramah's China, then, is the fantastic bogus China of convention, not the real historical thing at all. He wrote of it in a prose so perfectly conceived…

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of…