PREFACE

If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier
series of Letters to my Grandson on the Wid
about Him, you are to understand that in the
interval between those letters and these. An-
tony has grown to be a boy in the sixth form
of his public school.

It has not been any longer necessary there-
fore to study an extreme simplicity of diction
these letters.

My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in the world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the noblest of human aristocracy, he will never after

ards admit to his affection and intimacy anything mean or vulgar.

Many young people who, like Antony, are hot at all averse from the study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the

V

All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity from their hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected reverence, they all teach us to look up and not down, and by the nobility of their works which have penetrated into every home where letters are cultivated, they have done an incalculable service in forming and sustaining the high character of our race.

Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no permanence in such work, unless-which is seldom the case-it is totally devoid of personal vanity.

Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a writer who announces himself as equal if not superior to Shakespeare, and embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the creeds.

"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown us that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington

and Mrs. Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains England in its noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be sure that neither do these books in the faintest degree represent the true and living literature of the times. They will pass away and be forgotten as utterly as are the fashion plates and missing-word competitions of ten years ago.

Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature of England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him for life, to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and consolidate his character.

Your loving old

G. P.

MY DEAR ANTONY,

2

I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature, to the necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide distinction between what is good and what is bad style.

I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference between what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by putting side by side almost any sentence from the old authorised translation of the Bible and the same sentence from The Bible in Modern Speech.

I will just put two quotations side by side:

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."