I should probably try this book
first, but it has a fatal objection in its too seductive title. "I
am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts, "but
I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the book from its
natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing a
moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of course, that there are
a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling
them either moral or religious, though some of them certainly seem
as if they might fairly find a place in Mr. Arvine's work. There
are some things, however, which it is better not to know, and take
it all round I do not think I should be wise in putting myself in
the way of temptation, and adopting Arvine as the successor to my
beloved and lamented Frost.
Some successor I must find, or I must give up writing altogether,
and this I should be sorry to do. I have only as yet written about
a third, or from that--counting works written but not published--to
a half, of the books which I have set myself to write. It would not
so much matter if old age was not staring me in the face. Dr. Parr
said it was "a beastly shame for an old man not to have laid down a
good cellar of port in his youth"; I, like the greater number, I
suppose, of those who write books at all, write in order that I may
have something to read in my old age when I can write no longer.
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