[1] This letter, signed “S,” appeared in Public Opinion on April 3d, 1875. It is a criticism of the methods adopted by Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and an attempt to show that the enormous audiences drawn to the evangelistic services were not proof of their efficacy. Shaw then proceeds to explain the motives which induced many people to attend, predominant among them being “the curiosity excited by the great reputation of the evangelists and the stories, widely circulated, of the summary annihilation by epilepsy and otherwise of sceptics who had openly proclaimed their doubts of Mr. Moody's divine mission.” This letter has been reprinted in Public Opinion, November 8th, 1907.

In his monograph on Shaw (pp. 42-3), Mr. Holbrook Jackson has pointed out that this was not Shaw's first bid for publicity. In the Vaudeville Magazine of September, 1871, there appeared among the Editorial Replies the following: “G. B. Shaw, Torca Cottage, Torca Hill, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, Ireland.—You should have registered your letter; such a combination of wit and satire ought not to have been conveyed at the ordinary rate of postage. As it was, your arguments were so weighty, we had to pay twopence extra for them.”

[2] On Going to Church. This essay appeared originally in the Savoy Magazine, January, 1896; it is now published in book form by John W. Luce and Co., Boston, Mass.

[3] In the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw. Mainly About People, 1898.

[4] Compare Jubilee of Wesley College, Dublin, December, 1895—being a special number of the Wesley College Quarterly.

[5] Lee continued steadily to advance in his profession, becoming successively music-teacher, opera-conductor, festival conductor, and finally fashionable teacher of singing in Park Lane, London. He accomplished everything that he undertook, even conducting a Handel Festival in Dublin, participated in by Tietjens, Agnesi, and other leading singers of the day. For several years he enjoyed great popularity in London as a teacher of music. When he died, quite suddenly, at his home in Park Lane, it was discovered, Shaw afterwards remarked, that he had exhausted his stock of health in his Dublin period, and that the days of his vanity in London were days of progressive decay.

[6] In speaking of his apprenticeship as a clerk in the land office, Shaw declares: “I should have been there still if I had not broken loose in defiance of all prudence, and become a professional man of genius—a resource not open to every clerk. I mention this to show that the fact that I am not still a clerk may be regarded for the purposes of this article as a mere accident. I am not one of those successful men who can say, Why don't you do as I do?'”—From Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. By Himself in The Clerk, January, 1908.

[7] The Religion of the Pianoforte, in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894.

[8] Mr. Shaw's other sister, Miss Lucy Carr Shaw, was the immediate cause of her mother's settling in London. She became a professional singer, and, later, a writer. Her best known book is entitled Five Letters of the House of Kildonnel.