"For my own part I am convinced that a better way is to lure back the modernists to a study of great writers by presenting them in a more palatable form, not by compressing or abridging them--for that has been tried before--but by having them re-written in conformity with present-day standards by eminent contemporary writers. This notion had been germinating in my head for some time past, but I did not see my way clear until I read the luminous and epoch-making remark of Mr. C. K. SHORTER, that he would sooner have written _Tom Jones_ than any book published these two hundred years. In a moment, in a flash, my scheme took shape. 'He shall write it, or rather re-write it,' I said to myself, and I have already submitted to this eminent man of letters my rough _scenario_ of the lines on which FIELDING'S novel should be brought home to the Georgian mind. In reply he has made a counter-suggestion that the characters should be rearranged on a Victorian basis, CHARLOTTE BRONTË replacing _Sophia_, THACKERAY _Mr. Allworthy_, while the title-rôle should be assigned to an enterprising publisher. But I am not without hope that he will adopt my plan.
"The revival of interest in the works of RICHARDSON, the other great eighteenth-century novelist, is, I think I may safely say, a foregone conclusion. Miss DOROTHY RICHARDSON has enthusiastically welcomed the proposition that she should reconstruct the romances of her illustrious namesake, and confidently expects, on the basis of the method employed by her in _The Tunnel_, that she will be able to excavate at least a hundred volumes from the materials supplied in _Sir Charles Grandison_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_.
"Nor shall we overlook the earlier masters. Professor CHAMBERLIN, whose thrilling lectures on QUEEN ELIZABETH and Lord LEICESTER have been the talk of the town for the last fortnight, has kindly undertaken to organise a new _variorum_ version of the Plays of SHAKSPEARE, with the assistance of Mr. LOONEY, the writer of the recently-published and final work on the authorship of the plays. MILTON will be presented in both verse and prose, Mr. MASEFIELD having promised to re-write his epic in six-lined rhymed stanzas, shorn of Latinisms; while a famous novelist, who does not wish her name to appear at present, has consented to recast it in the form of a romance under the title of _The Miseries of Mephistopheles_.