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The Egoist, 4 (Dec 1917) 165

We invite critical comment from our readers, and we regret that lack of space prevents us from printing more than excerpts from the following letters:

Your writer on “Elizabethan Classicists” struck me, if I may say so without offence, as straining with youthful zeal after original opinions. His attempted rehabilitation of Ovid merely shows that the true taste for the Classics has gone out with the old classical curriculum; and as for his belittling of Milton–well, I do not believe that he could get a single one of the living Masters of criticism (Mr. Edmund Gosse, for example, or Sir Sidney Colvin) to even entertain such views. 2

J. A. D. Spence / Thridlingston Grammar School.

. . . I have, I pride myself, kept abreast of the times in literature; at least, if I have not, the times have moved very speedily indeed. I was therefore surprised, in what was otherwise an intelligent review (so far as I can judge, without having read the authors mentioned), to find Rupert Brooke dismissed abruptly with the words “He is not absent.” 3 Brooke’s early poems exhibit a youthful exuberance of passion and an occasional coarseness of utterance, which offended finer tastes; but these were but dross which, as his last sonnets show, was purged away (if I may be permitted this word) in the fire of the Great Ordeal which is proving the well-spring of a Renaissance of English poetry.

Helen B. Trundlett / Batton, Kent.

. . . There was a serious and instructive article on Constantinople by a Mr. Symons which I greatly enjoyed. It is good for us to keep our minds open and liberal by contemplation of foreign ways, and though the danse du ventreis repellant to the British imagination, we ought to know that these things exist. I cannot speak so pleasantly of Mr. Lewis’s . . . 4

Charles James Grimble / The Vicarage, Leays.

. . . The philosophical articles interest me enormously; though they make me reflect that much water has flowed under many bridges since the days of my dear old Oxford tutor, Thomas Hill Green. And I am accustomed to more documentation; I like to know where writers get their ideas from. . . . 5

Charles Augustus Conybeare / The Carlton Club, Liverpool.

. . . Is not Mr. Lewis’s objection to the Grin really a slur upon the cheery philosophy of our brave boys in the trenches, which has been so happily caught by the witty pen of Capt. Bairnsfather? And we all know that a little nonsense now and then . . . 6

Muriel A. Schwarz / 60 Alexandra Gardens, Hampstead, N.W.

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