To John Jay Chapman

CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 8, 1910.

Dear Jack,—Wonderful! wonderful! Shallow, incoherent, obnoxious to its own criticism of Chesterton and Shaw, off its balance, accidental, whimsical, false; but with central fires of truth "blazing fuliginous mid murkiest confusion," telling the reader nothing of the Comic except that it's smaller than the Tragic, but readable and splendid, showing that the man who wrote it is more than anything he can write!

Pray patch some kind of a finale to it and send it to the "Atlantic"! Yours ever fondly,

W. J.
(Membre de I'Institut!)

The "specimen" which was enclosed with the following note has been lost. It was perhaps a bit of adulatory verse. What is said about "Harris and Shakespeare," as also in a later letter to Mr. T. S. Perry on the same subject, was written apropos of a book entitled "The Man Shakespeare, His Tragic Life-Story."