Librarian Essayists I Have Known

IF I say that I knew Edmund Gosse, I mean merely that I once persuaded him to address the Library Assistants' Association. Later we exchanged a few letters on poetry. He came, a white‐haired, pink‐faced, portly man in the middle fifties, well‐groomed, and of that old‐world stately type which almost, but not quite, ascends to pomposity; sure of himself, as one who was accepted as the first of literary critics had a right to be. He appealed to us to work, light‐heartedly, under the aegis of that god most benign to literature and books, Mercury, and to forsake the gloomy influences which he thought pervaded our writings. That was after a rapid study of The Library Assistant of 1906.