ABSTRACT
NO man ever hated publicity, or what is now called ‘writing up’, with a more hearty hatred than did this great Englishman; but he was undeniably ‘good copy’, and ‘good copy’ he remains more than a decade after his death. Did not Mr. Robert Lynd imagine ‘a young critic a hundred years hence eagerly enquiring what manner of man was George Saintsbury’? Much has been written on the subject, much more than he himself would have wished, for the most part faithfully, in no instance with malice: yet if that young critic should try to reconstruct a true and lively image from certain of the published materials, the result could hardly fail to be a figure hopelessly out of drawing against a background wholly out of perspective. In the modest hope that these notes may be of some service to him—or to other interested enquirers less remote in time—I have accepted an invitation to put on record a few of my own memories and a portion of my own knowledge concerning ‘G. S.’
