The just appetite for rank gives rise to two kinds of duty, one or the other of which each of us in his sphere is bound to regard. There is first for much the greater part of men the duty of showing respect and deference to men of title, by which I do not mean only Lords absolute (which are Barons, Viscounts, Earls, Marquises and Dukes), but also Lords in gross, that is the whole body of lords, including lords by courtesy, ladies, their wives and mothers, honourables and cousins—especially heirs of Lords, and to some extent Baronets as well. Secondly, there is the duty of those few within whose power it lies to become Lords, Lords to become, lest the aristocratic element in our Constitution should decline. The most obvious way of doing one's duty in this regard if one is wealthy is to purchase a peerage, or a Baronetcy at the least, and when I consider how very numerous are the fortunes to which a sum of twenty or thirty thousand pounds is not really a sacrifice, and how few of their possessors exercise a tenacious effort to acquire rank by the disbursement of money, I cannot but fear for the future of the country! It is no small sign of our times that we should read so continually of large bequests to public charities made by men who have had every opportunity for entering the Upper House but who preferred to remain unnoted in the North of England and to leave their posterity no more dignified than they were themselves.

There is a yet more restricted class to whom it is open to become Lords by sheer merit. The one by gallant conduct in the field, another by a pretty talent for verse, a third by scientific research. And if any of my readers happen to be a man of this kind and yet hesitate to undertake the effort required of him, I would point out that our Constitution in its wisdom adds certain very material advantages to a peerage of this kind. It is no excuse for a man of military or scientific eminence to say that his income would not enable him to maintain such a dignity. Parliament is always ready to vote a sufficient grant of money, and even were it not so, it is quite possible to be a Lord and yet to be but poorly provided with the perishable goods of this world, as is very clearly seen in the case of no fewer than eighty-two Barons, fourteen Earls, and three dukes, a list of whom I had prepared for printing in these directions but have most unfortunately mislaid.

Again, even if one's private means be small, and if Parliament by some neglect omit to endow one's new splendour, the common sense of England will come to the help of any man so situated if he is worth his salt. He will with the greatest ease obtain positions of responsibility and emolument, notably upon the directorate of public companies, and can often, if he finds his salary insufficient, persuade his fellow-directors to increase it, whether by threatening them with exposure or by some other less drastic and more convivial means.

If after reading these lines there is anyone who still doubts the attitude that an honest man should take upon this matter, it is enough to point out in conclusion how Providence itself appears to have designed the whole hierarchy of Lords with a view to tempting man higher and ever higher. Thus, if some reader of this happens to be a baron, he might think perhaps that it is not worth a further effort to receive another grade of distinction. He would be wrong, for such an advance gives a courtesy title to his daughters; one more step and the same benefit accrues to his sons. After that there is indeed a hiatus, nor have I ever been able to see what advantage is held out to the viscount who desires to become a marquis—unless, indeed, it be marquises that become viscounts. Anyhow, it is the latter title which is the less English and the less manly and which I am glad to hear it is proposed to abolish by a short, one-clause bill in the next Session of Parliament. Above these, the dukes in the titles of their wives and the mode in which they are addressed stand alone. There is, therefore, no stage in a man's upward progress upon this ancient and glorious ladder where he will not find some great reward for the toil of ascending. In view of these things, I for my part hope, in common with many another, that the foolish pledge given some years ago when the Liberal Party was in opposition, that it would create no more Lords, will be revised now that it has to consider the responsibilities of office; a revision for which there is ample precedent in the case of other pledges which were as rashly made but of which a reconsideration has been found necessary in practice.

NOTE.—I find I am wrong upon Viscounts, but as I did not discover this until my book was in the press I cannot correct it. The remainder of the matter is accurate enough, and may be relied on by the student.



ON JINGOES: IN THE SHAPE OF A WARNING

BEING

The sad and lamentable history of Jack Bull, son of the late John Bull, India Merchant, wherein it will be seen how this prosperous merchant left an heir that ran riot with 'Squires, trainbands, Black men, and Soldiers, and squandered all his substance, so that at last he came to selling penny tokens in front of the Royal Exchange in Threadneedle Street, and is now very miserably writing for the papers.

John Bull, whom I knew very well, drove a great trade in tea, cotton goods, and bombazine, as also in hardware, all manner of cutlery, good and bad, and especially sea-coal, and was very highly respected in the City of London, of which he was twice Sheriff and once Lord Mayor. When he went abroad some begged of him, and to these he would give a million or so at a time openly in the street, so that a crowd would gather and cry, "Lord! what a generous fellow is this Mr. Bull!" Some, again, of better station would pluck his sleeve and take him aside into Broad Street Corner or Mansion House Court, and say, "Mr. Bull, a word in your ear. I have more paper about than I care for in these hard times, and I could pay you handsomely for a short loan." These always found Mr. Bull willing and ready, sure and silent, and, withal, cheaper at a discount than any other. For buying cloth all came to Bull; and for buying other wares his house was preferred to those of Frog and Hans and the rest, because he was courteous and ready, always to be found in his office (which was near the Wool-pack in Leaden Hall Street, next to Mr. Marlow's, the Methodist preacher), and moreover he was very attentive to little things. This last habit he would call the soul of business. In such fashion Mr. Bull had accumulated a sum of five hundred thousand million pounds, or thereabouts, and when he died the neighbours said this and that spiteful thing about his son Jack whom he had trained up to the business, making out that they knew more than they cared to say, that Jack was not John, that they had heard of Pride going before a fall, and so much tittle-tattle as jealousy will breed. But they were very much disappointed in their malice, for this same Jack went sturdily to work and trod in his father's steps, so that his wealth increased even beyond what he had inherited, and he had at last more risks upon the sea in one way and another than any other merchant in the City. And if you would know how Jack (who was, to tell the truth, more flighty and ill-informed than his father) came to go so wisely, it was thus: Old John had left him a few directions writ up in pencil on the mantelpiece, which ran in this way:—-

1. Never go into an adventure unless the feeling of your neighbours be with you.

2. Spend no more than you earn—nay, put by every year.

3. Put out no money for show in your business but only for use, save only on the occasion of the Lord Mayor's Show, your taking of an office, or on the occasion of public holidays, as, when the King's wife or daughter lies in.

4. Live and let live, for be sure your business can only thrive on the condition that others do also.

5. Vex no man at your door; buy and sell freely.

6. Do not associate with Drunkards, Brawlers and Poets; and God's blessing be with you.

Now when Jack was grown to about thirty years old, he came, most unfortunately, upon a certain Sir John Snipe, Bart., that was a very scandalous young squire of Oxfordshire, and one that had published five lyrics and a play (enough to warn any Bull against him), who spoke to him somewhat in this fashion:—-

"La! Jack, what a pity you and I should live so separate! I'll be bound you're the best fellow in the world, the very backbone of the country. To be sure there's a silly old-fashioned lot of Lumpkins in our part that will have it you're no gentleman, but I say, 'Gentle is as Gentle does,' and fair play's a jewel. I will enter your counting-house as soon as drink to you, as I do here."

Whereat Jack cried—

"God 'a' mercy, a very kind gentleman! Be welcome to my house. Pray take it as your own. I think you may count me one of you? Eh? Be seated. Come, how can I serve you?": and at last he had this Jackanapes taking a handsome salary for doing nothing.

When Jack's friends would reproach him and say, "Oh, Jack, Jack, beware this fine gentleman; he will be your ruin," Jack would answer, "A plague on all levellers," or again, "What if he be a gentleman? So that he have talent 'tis all I seek," or yet further, "Well, gentle or simple, thank God he's an honest Englishman." Whereat Jack added to the firm, Isaacs of Hamburg, Larochelle of Canada, Warramugga of Van Dieman's Land, Smuts Bieken of the Cape of Good Hope, and the Maharajah of Mahound of the East Indies that was a plaguey devilish-looking black fellow, pock-marked, and with a terrible great paunch to him.

So things went all to the dogs with poor Jack, that would hear no sense or reason from his father's old friends, but was always seen arm in arm with Sir John Snipe, Warra Mugga, the Maharajah and the rest; drinking at the sign of the "Beerage," gambling and dicing at "The Tape," or playing fisticuffs at the "Lord Nelson," till at last he quarrelled with all the world but his boon companions and, what was worse, boasted that his father's brother's son, rich Jonathan Spare, was of the company. So if he met some dirty dog or other in the street he would cry, "Come and sup to-night, you shall meet Cousin Jonathan!" and when no Jonathan was there he would make a thousand excuses saying, "Excuse Jonathan, I pray you, he has married a damned Irish wife that keeps him at home"; or, "What! Jonathan not come? Oh! we'll wait awhile. He never fails, for we are like brothers!" and so on; till his companions came to think at last that he had never met or known Jonathan; which was indeed the case.

About this time he began to think himself too fine a gentleman to live over the shop as his father had done, and so asked Sir John Snipe where he might go that was more genteel; for he still had too much sense to ask any of those other outlandish fellows' advice in such a matter. At last, on Snipe's bespeaking, he went to Wimbledon, which is a vastly smart suburb, and there, God knows, he fell into a thousand absurd tricks so that many thought he was off his head.

He hired a singing man to stand before his door day and night singing vulgar songs out of the street in praise of Dick Turpin and Molly Nog, only forcing him to put in his name of Jack Bull in the place of the Murderer or Oyster Wench therein celebrated.

He would drink rum with common soldiers in the public-houses and then ask them in to dinner to meet gentlemen, saying "These are heroes and gentlemen, which are the two first kinds of men," and they would smoke great pipes of tobacco in his very dining-room to the general disgust.

He would run out and cruelly beat small boys unaware, and when he had nigh killed them he would come back and sit up half the night writing an account of how he had fought Tom Mauler of Bermondsey and beaten him in a hundred and two rounds, which (he would add) no man living but he could do.

He would hang out of his window a great flag with a challenge on it "to all the people of Wimbledon assembled, or to any of them singly," and then he would be seen at his front gate waving a great red flag and gnawing a bone like a dog, saying that he loved Force only, and would fight all and any.

When he received any print, newspaper, book or pamphlet that praised any but himself, he would throw it into the fire in a kind of frenzy, calling God to witness that he was the only person of consequence in the world, that it was a horrible shame that he was so neglected, and Lord knows what other rubbish.

In this spirit he quarrelled with all his fellow-underwriters and friends and comrades, and that in the most insolent way. For knowing well that Mr. Frog had a shrew of a wife, he wrote to him daily asking "if he had had a domestic broil of late, and how his poor head felt since it was bandaged." To Mr. Hans, who lived in a small way and loved gardening, he sent an express "begging him to mind his cabbages and leave gentlemen to their greater affairs." To Niccolini of Savoy, the little swarthy merchant, he sent indeed a more polite note, but as he said in it "that he would be very willing to give him charity and help him as he could" and as he added "for my father it was that put you up in business" (which was a monstrous lie, for Frog had done this) he did but offend. Then to Mr. William Eagle, that was a strutting, arrogant fellow, but willing to be a friend, he wrote every Monday to say that the house of Bull was lost unless Mr. Eagle would very kindly protect it and every Thursday to challenge him to mortal combat, so that Mr. Eagle (who, to tell the truth, was no great wit, but something of a dullard and moreover suffering from a gathering in the ear, a withered arm, and poor blood) gave up his friendship and business with Bull and took to making up sermons and speeches for orators.

He would have no retainers but two, whose common names were Hocus and Pocus, but as he hated the use of common names and as no one had heard of Hocus' lineage (nor did he himself know it) he called him, Hocus, "Freedom" as being a high-sounding and moral name for a footman and Pocus (whose name was of an ordinary decent kind) he called "Glory" as being a good counterweight to Freedom; both these were names in his opinion very decent and well suited for a gentleman's servants.

Now Freedom and Glory got together in the apple closet and put it to each other that, as their master was evidently mad it would be a thousand pities to take no advantage of it, and they agreed that whatever bit of jobbing Hocus Freedom should do, Pocus Glory should approve; and contrariwise about. But they kept up a sham quarrel to mask this; thus Hocus was for Chapel, Pocus for Church, and it was agreed Hocus should denounce Pocus for drinking Port.

The first fruit of their conspiracy was that Hocus recommended his brother and sister, his two aunts and nieces and four nephews, his own six children, his dog, his conventicle-minister, his laundress, his secretary, a friend of whom he had once borrowed five pounds, and a blind beggar whom he favoured, to various posts about the house and to certain pensions, and these Jack Bull (though his fortune was already dwindling) at once accepted.

Thereupon Pocus loudly reproached Hocus in the servants' hall, saying that the compact had only stood for things in reason, whereat Hocus took off his coat and offered to "Take him on," and Pocus, thinking better of it, managed for his share to place in the household such relatives as he could, namely, Cohen to whom he was in debt, Bernstein his brother-in-law and all his family of five except little Hugh that blacked the boots for the Priest, and so was already well provided for.

In this way poor Jack's fortune went to rack and ruin. The clerks in his office in the City (whom he now never saw) would telegraph to him every making-up day that there was loss that had to be met, but to these he always sent the same reply, namely, "Sell stock and scrip to the amount"; and as that phrase was costly, he made a code-word, to wit, "Prosperity," stand for it. Till one day they sent word "There is nothing left." Then he bethought him how to live on credit, but this plan was very much hampered by his habit of turning in a passion on all those who did not continually praise him. Did an honest man look in and say, "Jack, there is a goat eating your cabbages," he would fly into a rage and say, "You lie, Pro-Boer, my cabbages are sacred, and Jove would strike the goat dead that dared to eat them," or if a poor fellow should touch his hat in the street and say, "Pardon, sir, your buttons are awry," he would answer, "Off, villain! Zounds, knave! Know you not that my Divine buttons are the model of things?" and so forth, until he fell into a perfect lunacy.

But of how he came to selling tokens of little leaden soldiers at a penny in front of the Exchange, and of how at last he even fell to writing for the papers, I will not tell you; for, imprimis, it has not happened yet, nor do I think it will, and in the second place I am tired of writing.



ON A WINGED HORSE AND THE EXILE WHO RODE HIM

It so happened that one day I was riding my horse Monster in the Berkshire Hills right up above that White Horse which was dug they say by this man and by that man, but no one knows by whom; for I was seeing England, a delightful pastime, but a somewhat anxious one if one is riding a horse. For if one is alone one can sleep where one chooses and walk at one's ease, and eat what God sends one and spend what one has; but when one is responsible for any other being (especially a horse) there come in a thousand farradiddles, for of everything that walks on earth, man (not woman—I use the word in the restricted sense) is the freest and the most unhappy.

Well, then, I was riding my horse and exploring the Island of England, going eastward of a summer afternoon, and I had so ridden along the ridge of the hills for some miles when I came, as chance would have it, upon a very extraordinary being.

He was a man like myself, but his horse, which was grazing by his side, and from time to time snorting in a proud manner, was quite unlike my own. This horse had all the strength of the horses of Normandy, all the lightness, grace, and subtlety of the horses of Barbary, all the conscious value of the horses that race for rich men, all the humour of old horses that have seen the world and will be disturbed by nothing, and all the valour of young horses who have their troubles before them, and race round in paddocks attempting to defeat the passing trains. I say all these things were in the horse, and expressed by various movements of his body, but the list of these qualities is but a hint of the way in which he bore himself; for it was quite clearly apparent as I came nearer and nearer to this strange pair that the horse before me was very different (as perhaps was the man) from the beings that inhabit this island.

While he was different in all qualities that I have mentioned—or rather in their combination—he also differed physically from most horses that we know, in this, that from his sides and clapt along them in repose was growing a pair of very fine sedate and noble wings. So habited, with such an expression and with such gestures of his limbs, he browsed upon the grass of Berkshire, which, if you except the grass of Sussex and the grass perhaps of Hampshire, is the sweetest grass in the world. I speak of the chalk-grass; as for the grass of the valleys, I would not eat it in a salad, let alone give it to a beast.

The man who was the companion rather than the master of this charming animal sat upon a lump of turf singing gently to himself and looking over the plain of Central England, the plain of the Upper Thames, which men may see from these hills. He looked at it with a mixture of curiosity, of memory, and of desire which was very interesting but also a little pathetic to watch. And as he looked at it he went on crooning his little song until he saw me, when with great courtesy he ceased and asked me in the English language whether I did not desire companionship.

I answered him that certainly I did, though not more than was commonly the case with me, for I told him that I had had companionship in several towns and inns during the past few days, and that I had had but a few hours' bout of silence and of loneliness.

"Which period," I added, "is not more than sufficient for a man of my years, though I confess that in early youth I should have found it intolerable."

When I had said this he nodded gravely, and I in my turn began to wonder of what age he might be, for his eyes and his whole manner were young, but there was a certain knowledge and gravity in his expression and in the posture of his body which in another might have betrayed middle age. He wore no hat, but a great quantity of his own hair, which was blown about by the light summer wind upon these heights. As he did not reply to me, I asked him a further question, and said:

"I see you are gazing upon the plain. Have you interests or memories in that view? I ask you without compunction so delicate a question because it is as open to you to lie as it was to me when I lied to them only yesterday morning, a little beyond Wayland's Cave, telling them that I had come to make sure of the spot where St. George conquered the Dragon, though, in truth, I had come for no such purpose, and telling them that my name was so-and-so, whereas it was nothing of the kind."

He brightened up at this, and said: "You are quite right in telling me that I am free to lie if I choose, and I would be very happy to lie to you if there were any purpose in so doing, but there is none. I gaze upon this plain with the memories that are common to all men when they gaze upon a landscape in which they have had a part in the years recently gone by. That is, the plain fills me with a sort of longing, and yet I cannot say that the plain has treated me unjustly. I have no complaint against it. God bless the plain!" After thinking a few moments, he added: "I am fond of Wantage; Wallingford has done me no harm; Oxford gave me many companions; I was not drowned at Dorchester beyond the Little Hills; and the best of men gave me a true farewell in Faringdon yonder. Moreover, Cumnor is my friend. Nevertheless, I like to indulge in a sort of sadness when I look over this plain."

I then asked him whither he would go next.

He answered: "My horse flies, and I am therefore not bound to any particular track or goal, especially in these light airs of summer when all the heaven is open to me."

As he said this I looked at his mount and noticed that when he shook his skin as horses will do in the hot weather to rid themselves of flies, he also passed a little tremor through his wings, which were large and goose-grey, and, spreading gently under that effort, seemed to give him coolness.

"You have," said I, "a remarkable horse."

At this word he brightened up as men do when something is spoken of that interests them nearly, and he answered: "Indeed, I have! and I am very glad you like him. There is no such other horse to my knowledge in England, though I have heard that some still linger in Ireland and in France, and that a few foals of the breed have been dropped of late years in Italy, but I have not seen them.

"How did you come by this horse?" said I; "if it is not trespassing upon your courtesy to ask you so delicate a question."

"Not at all; not at all," he answered. "This kind of horse runs wild upon the heaths of morning and can be caught only by Exiles: and I am one.... Moreover, if you had come three or four years later than you have I should have been able to give you an answer in rhyme, but I am sorry to say that a pestilent stricture of the imagination, or rather, of the compositive faculty so constrains me that I have not yet finished the poem I have been writing with regard to the discovery and service of this beast."

"I have great sympathy with you," I answered, "I have been at the ballade of Val-es-Dunes since the year 1897 and I have not yet completed it."

"Well, then," he said, "you will be patient with me when I tell you that I have but three verses completed." Whereupon without further invitation he sang in a loud and clear voice the following verse:

It's ten years ago to-day you turned me out of doors To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores. And I thought about the all in all ...

"The 'all in all,'" I said, "is weak."

He was immensely pleased with this, and, standing up, seized me by the hand. "I know you now," he said, "for a man who does indeed write verse. I have done everything I could with those three syllables, and by the grace of Heaven I shall get them right in time. Anyhow, they are the stop-gap of the moment, and with your leave I shall reserve them, for I do not wish to put words like 'tumty tum' into the middle of my verse."

I bowed to him, and he proceeded:

And I thought about the all in all, and more than I could tell; But I caught a horse to ride upon and rode him very well. He had flame behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side— And I ride; and I ride!

"Of how many verses do you intend this metrical composition to be?" said I, with great interest.

"I have sketched out thirteen," said he firmly, "but I confess that the next ten are so embryonic in this year 1907 that I cannot sing them in public." He hesitated a moment, then added: "They have many fine single lines, but there is as yet no composition or unity about them." And as he recited the words "composition" and "unity" he waved his hand about like a man sketching a cartoon.

"Give me, then," said I, "at any rate the last two." For I had rapidly calculated how many would remain of his scheme.

He was indeed pleased to be so challenged, and continued to sing:

And once atop of Lambourne Down, towards the hill of Clere, I saw the host of Heaven in rank and Michael with his spear And Turpin, out of Gascony, and Charlemagne the lord, And Roland of the Marches with his hand upon his sword For fear he should have need of it;—and forty more beside! And I ride; and I ride! For you that took the all in all...

"That again is weak," I murmured.

"You are quite right," he said gravely, "I will rub it out." Then he went on:

For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three: A loud Voice for singing, and keen Eyes to see, And a spouting Well of Joy within that never yet was dried! And I ride!

He sang this last in so fierce and so exultant a manner that I was impressed more than I cared to say, but not more than I cared to show. As for him, he cared little whether I was impressed or not; he was exalted and detached from the world.

There were no stirrups upon the beast. He vaulted upon it, and said as he did so:

"You have put me into the mood, and I must get away!"

And though the words were abrupt, he did speak them with such a grace that I will always remember them!

He then touched the flanks of his horse with his heels (on which there were no spurs) and at once beating the air powerfully twice or thrice with its wings it spurned the turf of Berkshire and made out southward and upward into the sunlit air, a pleasing and a glorious sight.

In a very little while they had dwindled to a point of light and were soon mixed with the sky. But I went on more lonely along the crest of the hills, very human, riding my horse Monster, a mortal horse—I had almost written a human horse. My mind was full of silence.

Some of those to whom I have related this adventure criticise it by the method of questions and of cross-examination proving that it could not have happened precisely where it did; showing that I left the vale so late in the afternoon that I could not have found this man and his mount at the hour I say I did, and making all manner of comments upon the exact way in which the feathers (which they say are those of a bird) grew out of the hide of the horse, and so forth. There are no witnesses of the matter, and I go lonely, for many people will not believe, and those who do believe believe too much.



ON A MAN AND HIS BURDEN

Once there was a Man who lived in a House at the Corner of a Wood with an excellent landscape upon every side, a village about one mile off, and a pleasant stream flowing over chalk and full of trout, for which he used to fish.

This man was perfectly happy for some little time, fishing for the trout, contemplating the shapes of clouds in the sky, and singing all the songs he could remember in turn under the high wood, till one day he found, to his annoyance, that there was strapped to his back a Burden.

However, he was by nature of a merry mood, and began thinking of all the things he had read about Burdens. He remembered an uncle of his called Jonas (ridiculous name) who had pointed out that Burdens, especially if borne in youth, strengthen the upper deltoid muscle, expand the chest, and give to the whole figure an erect and graceful poise. He remembered also reading in a book upon "Country Sports" that the bearing of heavy weights is an excellent training for all other forms of exercise, and produces a manly and resolute carriage, very useful in golf, cricket and Colonial wars. He could not forget his mother's frequent remark that a Burden nobly endured gave firmness, and at the same time elasticity, to the character, and altogether he went about his way taking it as kindly as he could; but I will not deny that it annoyed him.

In a few days he discovered that during sleep, when he lay down, the Burden annoyed him somewhat less than at other times, though the memory of it never completely left him. He would therefore sleep for a very considerable number of hours every day, sometimes retiring to rest as early as nine o'clock, nor rising till noon of the next day. He discovered also that rapid and loud conversation, adventure, wine, beer, the theatre, cards, travel, and so forth made him forget his Burden for the time being, and he indulged himself perhaps to excess in all these things. But when the memory of his Burden would return to him after each indulgence, whether working in his garden, or fishing for trout, or on a lonely walk, he began reluctantly to admit that, on the whole, he felt uncertainty and doubt as to whether the Burden was really good for him.

In this unpleasing attitude of mind he had the good fortune one day to meet with an excellent Divine who inhabited a neighbouring parish, and was possessed of no less a sum than L29,000. This Ecclesiastic, seeing his whilom jocund Face fretted with the Marks of Care, put a hand gently upon his shoulder and said:

"My young friend, I easily perceive that you are put out by this Burden which you bear upon your shoulders. I am indeed surprised that one so intelligent should take such a matter so ill. What! Do you not know that burdens are the common lot of humanity? I myself, though you may little suspect it, bear a burden far heavier than yours, though, true, it is invisible, and not strapped on to my shoulders by gross material thongs of leather, as is yours. The worthy Squire of our parish bears one too; and with what manliness! what ease! what abnegation! Believe me, these other Burdens of which you never hear, and which no man can perceive, are for that very reason the heaviest and the most trying. Come, play the man! Little by little you will find that the patient sustenance of this Burden will make you something greater, stronger, nobler than you were, and you will notice as you grow older that those who are most favoured by the Unseen bear the heaviest of such impediments."

With these last words recited in a solemn, and, as it were, an inspired voice, the Hierarch lifted an immense stone from the roadway, and placing it on the top of the Burden, so as considerably to add to its weight, went on his way.

The irritation of the Man was already considerable when his family called upon him—his mother, that is, his younger sister, his cousin Jane, and her husband—and after they had eaten some of his food and drunk some of his beer they all sat out in the garden with him and talked to him somewhat in this manner:

"We really cannot pity you much, for ever since you were a child whatever evil has happened to you has been your own doing, and probably this is no different from the rest.... What can have possessed you to get putting upon your back an ugly, useless, and dangerous great Burden! You have no idea how utterly out of fashion you seem, stumbling about the roads like a clodhopper, and going up and downstairs as though you were on the treadmill.... For the Lord's sake, at least have the decency to stay at home and not to disgrace the family with your miserable appearance!"

Having said so much they rose, and adding to his burden a number of leaden weights they had brought with them, went on their way and left him to his own thoughts.

You may well imagine that by this time the irritation of the Man had gone almost past bearing. He would quarrel with his best friends, and they, in revenge, would put something more on to the burden, till he felt he would break down. It haunted his dreams and filled most of his waking thoughts, and did all those things which burdens have been discovered to do since the beginning of time, until at last, though very reluctantly, he determined to be rid of it.

Upon hearing of this resolution his friends and acquaintances raised a most fearful hubbub; some talked of sending for the police, others of restraining him by force, and others again of putting him into an asylum, but he broke away from them all, and, making for the open road, went out to see if he could not rid himself of this abominable strain.

Of himself he could not, for the Burden was so cunningly strapped on that his hands could not reach it, and there was magic about it, and a spell; but he thought somewhere there must be someone who could tell him how to cast it away.

In the very first ale-house he came to he discovered what is common to such places, namely, a batch of politicians, who laughed at him very loudly for not knowing how to get rid of burdens. "It is done," they said, "by the very simple method of paying one of us to get on top and undo the straps." This the man said he would be very willing to do, whereat the politicians, having fought somewhat among themselves for the money, desisted at last in favour of the most vulgar, who climbed on to the top of the man's burden, and remained there, viewing the landscape and commenting in general terms upon the nature of public affairs, and when the man complained a little, the politician did but cuff him sharply on the side of the head to teach him better manners.

Yet a little further on he met with a Scientist, who told him in English Greek a clear and simple method of getting rid of the burden, and, since the Man did not seem to understand, he lost his temper, and said, "Come, let me do it," and climbed up by the side of the Politician. Once there the Scientist confessed that the problem was not so easy as he had imagined.

"But," said he, "now that I am here, you may as well carry me, for it will be no great additional weight, and meanwhile I will spend most of my time in trying to set you free."

And the third man he met was a Philosopher with quiet eyes; a person whose very gestures were profound. Taking by the hand the Man, now fevered and despairing, he looked at him with a mixture of comprehension and charity, and he said:

"My poor fellow, your eyes are very wild and staring and bloodshot. How little you understand the world!" Then he smiled gently, and said, "Will you never learn?"

And without another word he climbed up on the top of the burden and seated himself by the side of the other two.

After this the man went mad.

The last time I saw him he was wandering down the road with his burden very much increased. He was bearing not only these original three, but some Kings and Tax-gatherers and Schoolmasters, several Fortune-tellers, and an Old Admiral. He was blind, and they were goading him. But as he passed me he smiled and gibbered a little, and told me it was in the nature of things, and went on downward stumbling.

This Parable I think, as I re-read it, demands a KEY, lest it prove a stumbling-block to the muddle-headed and a perplexity to the foolish. Here then is the KEY:—

The MAN is a MAN. His BURDEN is that Burden which men often feel themselves to be bearing as they advance from youth to manhood. The RELATIVES (his mother, his sister, his cousins, etc.) are a Man's RELATIVES and the little weights they add to the BURDEN are the little additional weights a Man's RELATIVES commonly add to his burden. The PARSON represents a PARSON, and the POLITICIAN, the PHILOSOPHER, the SCIENTIST, the KINGS, the TAX-GATHERERS and the OLD ADMIRAL, stand severally for an OLD ADMIRAL, TAX-GATHERERS, POLITICIANS, PHILOSOPHERS, SCIENTISTS and KINGS.

_The_ POLITICIANS _who fight for the_ MONEY _represent_ POLITICIANS, _and the_ MONEY _they struggle for is the_ MONEY _for which Politicians do ceaselessly jostle and barge one another. The_ MOST VULGAR _in whose favour the others desist, represents the_ MOST VULGAR _who, among Politicians, invariably obtains the largest share of whatever public money is going.

The MADNESS of the Man at the end, stands for the MADNESS which does as a fact often fall upon Men late in life if their Burdens are sufficiently increased.

I trust that with this Key the Parable will be clear to all._



ON A FISHERMAN AND THE QUEST OF PEACE

In that part of the Thames where the river begins to feel its life before it knows its name the counties play with it upon either side. It is not yet a boundary. The parishes upon the northern bank are sometimes as truly Wiltshire as those to the south. The men upon the farms that look at each other over the water are close neighbours; they use the same words and the way they build their houses is the same. Between them runs the beginning of the Thames.

From the surface of the water the whole prospect is sky, bounded by reeds; but sitting up in one's canoe one sees between the reeds distant hills to the southward, or, on the north, trees in groups, and now and then the roofs of a village; more often the lonely group of a steading with a church close by.

Floating down this stream quite silently, but rather swiftly upon a summer's day, I saw on the bank to my right a very pleasant man. He was perhaps a hundred yards or two hundred ahead of me when I first caught sight of him, and perceived that he was a clergyman of the Church of England. He was fishing.

He was dressed in black, even his hat was black (though it was of straw), but his collar was of such a kind as his ancestors had worn, turned down and surrounded by a soft white tie. His face was clear and ruddy, his eyes honest, his hair already grey, and he was gazing intently upon the float; for I will not conceal it that he was fishing in that ancient manner with a float shaped like a sea-buoy and stuck through with a quill. So fish the yeomen to this day in Northern France and in Holland. Upon such immutable customs does an ancient State repose, which, if they are disturbed, there is danger of its dissolution.

As I so looked at him and rapidly approached him I took care not to disturb the water with my paddle, but to let the boat glide far from his side, until in the pleasure of watching him, I got fast upon the further reeds. There she held and I, knowing that the effort of getting her off would seriously stir the water, lay still. Nor did I speak to him, though he pleased me so much, because a friend of mine in Lambourne had once told me that of all things in Nature what a fish most fears is the voice of a man.

He, however, first spoke to me in a sort of easy tone that could frighten no fish. He said "Hullo!"

I answered him in a very subdued voice, for I have no art where fishes are concerned, "Hullo!"

Then he asked me, after a good long time, whether his watch was right, and as he asked me he pulled out his, which was a large, thick, golden watch, and looked at it with anxiety and dread. He asked me this, I think, because I must have had the look of a tired man fresh from the towns, and with the London time upon him, and yet I had been for weeks in no town larger than Cricklade: moreover, I had no watch. Since, none the less, it is one's duty to uplift, sustain, and comfort all one's fellows I told him that his watch was but half a minute fast, and he put it back with a greater content than he had taken it out; and, indeed, anyone who blames me for what I did in so assuring him of the time should remember that I had other means than a watch for judging it. The sunlight was already full of old kindness, the midges were active, the shadow of the reeds on the river was of a particular colour, the haze of a particular warmth; no one who had passed many days and nights together sleeping out and living out under this rare summer could mistake the hour.

In a little while I asked him whether he had caught any fish. He said he had not actually caught any, but that he would have caught several but for accidents, which he explained to me in technical language. Then he asked me in his turn where I was going to that evening. I said I had no object before me, that I would sleep when I felt sleepy, and wake when I felt wakeful, and that I would so drift down Thames till I came to anything unpleasant, when it was my design to leave my canoe at once, to tie it up to a post, and to go off to another place, "for," I told him, "I am here to think about Peace, and to see if She can be found." When I said this his face became moody, and, as though such portentous thoughts required action to balance them, he strained his line, lifted his float smartly from the water (so that I saw the hook flying through the air with a quarter of a worm upon it), and brought it down far up the stream. Then he let it go slowly down again as the water carried it, and instead of watching it with his steady and experienced eyes he looked up at me and asked me if, as yet, I had come upon any clue to Peace, that I expected to find Her between Cricklade and Bablock Hythe. I answered that I did not exactly expect to find Her, that I had come out to think about Her, and to find out whether She could be found. I told him that often and often as I wandered over the earth I had clearly seen Her, as once in Auvergne by Pont-Gibaud, once in Terneuzen, several times in Hazlemere, Hampstead, Clapham, and other suburbs, and more often than I could tell in the Weald: "but seeing Her," said I, "is one thing and holding Her is another. I hardly propose to follow all Her ways, but I do propose to consider Her nature until I know so much as to be able to discover Her at last whenever I have need, for I am convinced by this time that nothing else is worth the effort of a man ... and I think I shall achieve my object somewhere between here and Bablock Hythe."

He told me without interest that there was nothing attractive in the pursuit or in its realisation.

I answered with equal promptitude that the whole of attraction was summed up in it: that to nothing else did we move by nature, and to nothing else were we drawn but to Peace. I said that a completion and a fulfilment were vaguely demanded by a man even in very early youth, that in manhood the desire for them became a passion and in early middle age so overmastering and natural a necessity that all who turned aside from it and attempted to forget it were justly despised by their fellows and were some of them money-makers, some of them sybarites, but all of them perverted men, whose hard eyes, weak mouths, and fear of every trial sufficiently proved the curse that was upon them. I told him as heatedly as one can speak lying back in a canoe to a man beyond a little river that he, being older than I, should know that everything in a full man tended towards some place where expression is permanent and secure; and then I told him that since I had only seen such a place far off as it were, but never lived in, I had set forth to see if I might think out the way to it, "and I hope," I said, "to finish the problem not so far down as Bablock Hythe, but nearer by, towards New Bridge or even higher, by Kelmscott,"

He asked me, after a little space, during which he took off the remnant of the worm and replaced it by a large new one, whether when I said "Peace" I did not really mean "Harmony."

At this phrase a suspicion rose in my mind; it seemed to me that I knew the school that had bred him, and that he and I should be acquainted. So I was appeased and told him I did not mean Harmony, for Harmony suggested that we had to suit ourselves to the things around us or to get suited to them. I told him what I was after was no such German Business, but something which was Fruition and more than Fruition—full power to create and at the same time to enjoy, a co-existence of new delight and of memory, of growth, and yet of foreknowledge and an increasing reverence that should be increasingly upstanding, and high hatred as well as high love justified; for surely this Peace is not a lessening into which we sink, but an enlargement which we merit and into which we rise and enter—"and this," I ended, "I am determined to obtain before I get to Bablock Hythe."

He shook his head determinedly and said my quest was hopeless.

"Sir," said I, "are you acquainted with the Use of Sarum?"

"I have read it," he said, "but I do not remember it well." Then, indeed, indeed I knew that he was of my own University and of my own college, and my heart warmed to him as I continued:

"It is in Latin; but, after all, that was the custom of the time."

"Latin," he answered, "was in the Middle Ages a universal tongue."

"Do you know," said I, "that passage which begins 'Illam Pacem——'?"

At this moment the float, which I had almost forgotten but which he in the course of our speeches had more and more remembered, began to bob up and down violently, and, if I may so express myself, the Philosopher in him was suddenly swamped by the Fisherman. He struck with the zeal and accuracy of a conqueror; he did something dexterous with his rod, flourished the line and landed a magnificent—ah! There the whole story fails, for what on earth was the fish?

Had it been a pike or a trout I could have told it, for I am well acquainted with both; but this fish was to me as a human being is to a politician: this fish was to me unknown....



ON A HERMIT WHOM I KNEW

In a valley of the Apennines, a little before it was day, I went down by the side of a torrent wondering where I should find repose; for it was now some hours since I had given up all hope of discovering a place for proper human rest and for the passing of the night, but at least I hoped to light upon a dry bed of sand under some overhanging rock, or possibly of pine needles beneath closely woven trees, where one might get sleep until the rising of the sun.

As I still trudged, half expectant and half careless, a man came up behind me, walking quickly as do mountain men: for throughout the world (I cannot tell why) I have noticed that the men of the mountains walk quickly and in a sprightly manner, arching the foot, and with a light and general gait as though the hills were waves and as though they were in thought springing upon the crests of them. This is true of all mountaineers. They are but few.

This man, I say, came up behind me and asked me whether I were going towards a certain town of which he gave me the name, but as I had not so much as heard of this town I told him I knew nothing of it. I had no map, for there was no good map of that district, and a bad map is worse than none. I knew the names of no towns except the large towns on the coast. So I said to him:

"I cannot tell anything about this town, I am not making towards it. But I desire to reach the sea coast, which I know to be many hours away, and I had hoped to sleep overnight under some roof or at least in some cavern, and to start with the early morning; but here I am, at the end of the night, without repose and wondering whether I can go on."

He answered me:

"It is four hours to the sea coast, but before you reach it you will find a lane branching to the right, and if you will go up it (for it climbs the hill) you will find a hermitage. Now by the time you are there the hermit will be risen."

"Will he be at his prayers?" said I.

"He says no prayers to my knowledge," said my companion lightly; "for he is not a hermit of that kind. Hermits are many and prayers are few. But you will find him bustling about, and he is a very hospitable man. Now as it so happens that the road to the sea coast bends here round along the foot of the hills, you will, in his company, perceive the port below you and the populace and the high road, and yet you will be saving a good hour in distance of time, and will have ample rest before reaching your vessel, if it is a vessel indeed that you intend to take."

When he had said these things I thanked him and gave him a bit of sausage and went along my way, for as he had walked faster than me before our meeting and while I was still in the dumps, so now I walked faster than him, having received good news.

All happened just as he had described. The dawn broke behind me over the noble but sedate peaks of the Apennines; it first defined the heights against the growing colours of the sun, it next produced a general warmth and geniality in the air about me; it last displayed the downward opening of the valley, and, very far off, a plain that sloped towards the sea.

Invigorated by the new presence of the day I went forward more rapidly, and came at last to a place where a sculptured panel made out of marble, very clever and modern, and representing a mystery, marked the division between two ways; and I took the lane to my right as my companion of the night hours had advised me.

For perhaps a mile or a little more the lane rose continually between rough walls intercepted by high banks of thorn, with here and there a vineyard, and as it rose one had between the breaches of the wall glimpses of an ever-growing sea: for, as one rose, the sea became a broader and a broader belt, and the very distant islands, which at first had been but little clouds along the horizon, stood out and became parts of the landscape, and, as it were, framed all the bay.

Then at last, when I had come to the height of the hill, to where it turned a corner and ran level along the escarpment of the cliffs that dominated the sea plain, I saw below me a considerable stretch of country, between the fall of the ground and the distant shore, and under the daylight which was now full and clear one could perceive that all this plain was packed with an intense cultivation, with houses, happiness and men.

Far off, a little to the northward, lay the mass of a town; and stretching out into the Mediterranean with a gesture of command and of desire were the new arms of the harbour.

To see such things filled me with a complete content. I know not whether it be the effect of long vigil, or whether it be the effect of contrast between the darkness and the light, but certainly to come out of a lonely night spent on the mountains, down with the sunlight into the civilisation of the plain, is, for any man that cares to undergo the suffering and the consolation, as good as any experience that life affords. Hardly had I so conceived the view before me when I became aware, upon my right, of a sort of cavern, or rather a little and carefully minded shrine, from which a greeting proceeded.

I turned round and saw there a man of no great age and yet of a venerable appearance. He was perhaps fifty-five years old, or possibly a little less, but he had let his grey-white hair grow longish and his beard was very ample and fine. It was he that had addressed me. He sat dressed in a long gown in a modern and rather luxurious chair at a low long table of chestnut wood, on which he had placed a few books, which I saw were in several languages and two of them not only in English, but having upon them the mark of an English circulating library which did business in the great town at our feet. There was also upon the table a breakfast ready of white bread and honey, a large brown coffee-pot, two white cups, and some goat's milk in a bowl of silver. This meal he asked me to share.

"It is my custom," he said, "when I see a traveller coming up my mountain road to get out a cup and a plate for him, or, if it is midday, a glass. At evening, however, no one ever comes."

"Why not?" said I.

"Because," he answered, "this lane goes but a few yards further round the edge of the cliff, and there it ends in a precipice; the little platform where we are is all but the end of the way. Indeed, I chose it upon that account, seeing, when I first came here, that from its height and isolation it was well fitted for my retreat."

I asked him how long ago that was, and he said nearly twenty years. For all that time, he added, he had lived there, going down into the plain but once or twice in a season and having for his rare companions those who brought him food and the peasants on such days as they toiled up to work at their plots towards the summit; also, from time to time, a chance traveller like myself. But these, he said, made but poor companions, for they were usually such as had missed their way at the turning and arrived at that high place of his out of breath and angry. I assured him that this was not my case, for a man had told me in the night how to find his hermitage and I had come of set purpose to see him. At this he smiled.

We were now seated together at table eating and talking so, when I asked him whether he had a reputation for sanctity and whether the people brought him food. He answered with a little hesitation that he had a reputation, he thought, for necromancy rather than anything else, and that upon this account it was not always easy to persuade a messenger to bring him the books in French and English which he ordered from below, though these were innocent enough, being, as a rule, novels written by women or academicians, records of travel, the classics of the Eighteenth Century, or the biographies of aged statesmen. As for food, the people of the place did indeed bring it to him, but not, as in an idyll, for courtesy; contrariwise, they demanded heavy payment, and his chief difficulty was with bread; for stale bread was intolerable to him. In the matter of religion he would not say that he had none, but rather that he had several religions; only at this season of the year, when everything was fresh, pleasant and entertaining, he did not make use of any of them, but laid them all aside. As this last saying of his had no meaning for me I turned to another matter and said to him:

"In any solitude contemplation is the chief business of the soul. How, then, do you, who say you practise no rites, fill up your loneliness here?"

In answer to this question he became more animated, spoke with a sort of laugh in his voice, and seemed as though he were young again and as though my question had aroused a whole lifetime of good memories.

"My contemplation," he said, not without large gestures, "is this wide and prosperous plain below: the great city with its harbour and ceaseless traffic of ships, the roads, the houses building, the fields yielding every year to husbandry, the perpetual activities of men. I watch my kind and I glory in them, too far off to be disturbed by the friction of individuals, yet near enough to have a daily companionship in the spectacle of so much life. The mornings, when they are all at labour, I am inspired by their energy; in the noons and afternoons I feel a part of their patient and vigorous endurance; and when the sun broadens near the rim of the sea at evening, and all work ceases, I am filled with their repose. The lights along the harbour front in the twilight and on into the darkness remind me of them when I can no longer see their crowds and movements, and so does the music which they love to play in their recreation after the fatigues of the day, and the distant songs which they sing far into the night.

"I was about thirty years of age, and had seen (in a career of diplomacy) many places and men; I had a fortune quite insufficient for a life among my equals. My youth had been, therefore, anxious, humiliated, and worn when, upon a feverish and unhappy holiday taken from the capital of this State, I came by accident to the cave and platform which you see. It was one of those days in which the air exhales revelation, and I clearly saw that happiness inhabited the mountain corner. I determined to remain for ever in so rare a companionship, and from that day she has never abandoned me. For a little while I kept a touch with the world by purchasing those newspapers in which I was reported shot by brigands or devoured by wild beasts, but the amusement soon wearied me, and now I have forgotten the very names of my companions."

We were silent then until I said: "But some day you will die here all alone."

"And why not?" he answered calmly. "It will be a nuisance for those who find me, but I shall be indifferent altogether."

"That is blasphemy," says I.

"So says the priest of St. Anthony," he immediately replied—but whether as a reproach, an argument, or a mere commentary I could not discover.

In a little while he advised me to go down to the plain before the heat should incommode my journey. I left him, therefore, reading a book of Jane Austen's, and I have never seen him since.

Of the many strange men I have met in my travels he was one of the most strange and not the least fortunate. Every word I have written about him is true.



OF AN UNKNOWN COUNTRY

Ten years ago, I think, or perhaps a little less or perhaps a little more, I came in the Euston Road—that thoroughfare of Empire—upon a young man a little younger than myself whom I knew, though I did not know him very well. It was drizzling and the second-hand booksellers (who are rare in this thoroughfare) were beginning to put out the waterproof covers over their wares. This disturbed my acquaintance, because he was engaged upon buying a cheap book that should really satisfy him.

Now this was difficult, for he had no hobby, and the book which should satisfy him must be one that should describe or summon up, or, it is better to say, hint at—or, the theologians would say, reveal, or the Platonists would say recall—the Unknown Country, which he thought was his very home.

I had known his habit of seeking such books for two years, and had half wondered at it and half sympathised. It was an appetite partly satisfied by almost any work that brought to him the vision of a place in the mind which he had always intensely desired, but to which, as he had then long guessed, and as he is now quite certain, no human paths directly lead. He would buy with avidity travels to the moon and to the planets, from the most worthless to the best. He loved Utopias and did not disregard even so prosaic a category as books of real travel, so long as by exaggeration or by a glamour in the style they gave him a full draught of that drug which he desired. Whether this satisfaction the young man sought was a satisfaction in illusion (I have used the word "drug" with hesitation), or whether it was, as he persistently maintained, the satisfaction of a memory, or whether it was, as I am often tempted to think, the satisfaction of a thirst which will ultimately be quenched in every human soul I cannot tell. Whatever it was, he sought it with more than the appetite with which a hungry man seeks food. He sought it with something that was not hunger but passion.

That evening he found a book.

It is well known that men purchase with difficulty second-hand books upon the stalls, and that in some mysterious way the sellers of these books are content to provide a kind of library for the poorer and more eager of the public, and a library admirable in this, that it is accessible upon every shelf and exposes a man to no control, except that he must not steal, and even in this it is nothing but the force of public law that interferes. My friend therefore would in the natural course of things have dipped into the book and left it there; but a better luck persuaded him. Whether it was the beginning of the rain or a sudden loneliness in such terrible weather and in such a terrible town, compelling him to seek a more permanent companionship with another mind, or whether it was my sudden arrival and shame lest his poverty should appear in his refusing to buy the book—whatever it was, he bought that same. And since he bought the Book I also have known it and have found in it, as he did, the most complete expression that I know of the Unknown Country, of which he was a citizen—oddly a citizen, as I then thought, wisely as I now conceive.

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times. If I were perfectly sure of my accents I would quote two lines from the Odyssey in which the Unknown Country stands out as clear as does a sudden vision from a mountain ridge when the mist lifts after a long climb and one sees beneath one an unexpected and glorious land; such a vision as greets a man when he comes over the Saldeu into the simple and secluded Republic of the Andorrans. Then, again, the Germans in their idioms have flashed it out, I am assured, for I remember a woman telling me that there was a song by Schiller which exactly gave the revelation of which I speak. In English, thank Heaven, emotion of this kind, emotion necessary to the life of the soul, is very abundantly furnished. As, who does not know the lines:

Blessed with that which is not in the word Of man nor his conception: Blessed Land!

Then there is also the whole group of glimpses which Shakespeare amused himself by scattering as might a man who had a great oak chest full of jewels and who now and then, out of kindly fun, poured out a handful and gave them to his guests. I quote from memory, but I think certain of the lines run more or less like this:

Look how the dawn in russet mantle clad Stands on the steep of yon high eastern hill.

And again:

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Which moves me to digress.... How on earth did any living man pull it off as well as that? I remember arguing with a man who very genuinely thought the talent of Shakespeare was exaggerated in public opinion, and discovering at the end of a long wrangle that he was not considering Shakespeare as a poet. But as a poet, then, how on earth did he manage it?

Keats did it continually, especially in the Hyperion. Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey. William Morris does it, especially in the verses about a prayer over the corn; and as for Virgil, the poet Virgil, he does it continually like a man whose very trade it is. Who does not remember the swimmer who saw Italy from the top of the wave?

Here also let me digress. How do the poets do it? (I do not mean where do they get their power, as I was asking just now of Shakespeare, but how do the words, simple or complex, produce that effect?) Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object. There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence, and expand out into completion and into manhood.

Catullus does it. He does it so powerfully in the opening lines of

Vesper adest ...

that a man reads the first couplet of that Hymeneal, and immediately perceives the Apennines.

The nameless translator of the Highland song does it, especially when he advances that battering line—

And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

They all do it, bless their hearts, the poets, which leads me back again to the mournful reflection that it cannot be done in prose....

Little friends, my readers, I wish it could be done in prose, for if it could, and if I knew how to do it, I would here present to you that Unknown Country in such a fashion that every landscape which you should see henceforth would be transformed, by the appearing through it, the shining and uplifting through it, of the Unknown Country upon which reposes this tedious and repetitive world.

Now you may say to me that prose can do it, and you may quote to me the end of the Pilgrim's Progress, a very remarkable piece of writing. Or, better still, as we shall be more agreed upon it, the general impression left upon the mind by the book which set me writing—Mr. Hudson's Crystal Age. I do not deny that prose can do it, but when it does it, it is hardly to be called prose, for it is inspired. Note carefully the passages in which the trick is worked in prose (for instance, in the story of Ruth in the Bible, where it is done with complete success), you will perceive an incantation and a spell. Indeed this same episode of Ruth in exile has inspired two splendid passages of European verse, of which it is difficult to say which is the more national, and therefore the greatest, Victor Hugo's in the Legende des Siecles or Keats's astounding four lines.

There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men. He was occupied when I came upon him in pulling Mr. Fulton's sheep by one hind leg so that they should go the way they were desired to go. It happened that day that Mr. Fulton's sheep were not sold, and the shepherd went driving them back through Findon Village, and up on to the high Downs. I went with him to hear what he had to say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men. And when we came on to the shoulder of Chanctonbury and looked down upon the Weald, which stretched out like the Plains of Heaven, he said to me: "I never come here but it seems like a different place down below, and as though it were not the place where I have gone afoot with sheep under the hills. It seems different when you are looking down at it." He added that he had never known why. Then I knew that he, like myself, was perpetually in perception of the Unknown Country, and I was very pleased. But we did not say anything more to each other about it until we got down into Steyning. There we drank together and we still said nothing more about it, so that to this day all we know of the matter is what we knew when we started, and what you knew when I began to write this, and what you are now no further informed upon, namely, that there is an Unknown Country lying beneath the places that we know, and appearing only in moments of revelation.

Whether we shall reach this country at last or whether we shall not, it is impossible to determine.



ON A FAERY CASTLE

A woman whose presence in English letters will continue to increase wrote of a cause to which she had dedicated her life that it was like that Faery Castle of which men became aware when they wandered upon a certain moor. In that deserted place (the picture was taken from the writings of Sir Walter Scott) the lonely traveller heard above him a noise of bugles in the air, and thus a Faery Castle was revealed; but again, when the traveller would reach it, a doom comes upon him, and in the act of its attainment it vanishes away.

We are northern, full of dreams in the darkness; this Castle is caught in glimpses, a misty thing. It is seen a moment—then it mixes once again with the mist of our northern air, and when that mist has lifted from the heath there is nothing before the watcher but a bare upland open to the wind and roofed only by hurrying cloud. Yet in the moment of revelation most certainly the traveller perceived it, and the call of its bugle-guard was very clear. He continues his way perceiving only the things he knows—trees bent by the gale, rude heather, the gravel of the path, and mountains all around. In that landscape he has no companion; yet he cannot but be haunted, as he goes, by towers upon which he surely looked, and by the sharp memory of bugle-notes that still seem to startle his hearing.

In our legends of Western Europe this Castle perpetually returns. It has been seen not only on the highlands of Ireland, of Wales, of Brittany, of the Asturias, of Normandy, and of Auvergne, but in the plains also, and on those river meadows where wealth comes so fast that even simple men early forget the visions of the hills. The imagination, or rather the speech, of our race has created or recognised throughout our territory this stronghold which was not altogether of the world.

Queen Iseult, as she sat with Tristan in a Castle Garden, towards the end of a summer night, whispered to him: "Tristan, they say that this Castle is Faery; it is revealed at the sound of a Trumpet, but presently it vanishes away," and as she said it the bugles rang dawn.

Raymond of Saragossa saw this Castle, also, as he came down from the wooded hills after he had found the water of life and was bearing it towards the plain. He saw the towers quite clearly and also thought he heard the call upon that downward road at whose end he was to meet with Bramimonde. But he saw it thence only, in the exaltation of the summits as he looked over the falling forest to the plain and the Sierra miles beyond. He saw it thence only. Never after upon either bank of Ebro could he come upon it, nor could any man assure him of the way.

In the Story of Val-es-Dunes, Hugh the Fortinbras out of the Cotentin had a castle of this kind. For when, after the battle, they count the dead, the Priest finds in the sea-grass among other bodies that of this old Lord....

... and Hugh that trusted in his glass, But rode not home the day; Whose title was the Fortinbras With the Lords of his Array.

This was that old Hugh the Fortinbras who had been Lord to the Priest's father, so that when the battle was engaged the Priest watched him from the opposing rank, and saw him fall, far off, just as the line broke and before the men of the Caux country had room to charge. It was easy to see him, for he rode a high horse and was taller than other Normans, and when his horse was wounded....

... The girth severed and the saddle swung And he went down; He never more sang winter songs In his High Town.

In his High Town that Faery is And stands on Harcourt Lea; To summon him up his arrier-ban His writ beyond the mountain ran. My father was his serving-man; Although the farm was free. Before the angry wars began He was a friend to me!

In his High Town that Faery is And stands on Harcourt bay; The Fisher driving through the night Makes harbour by that castle height And moors him till the day: But with the broadening of the light It vanishes away.

So the Faery Castle comes in by an illusion in the Ballad of the Battle of Val-es-Dunes.

* * * * *

What is this vision which our race has so symbolised or so seen and to which are thus attached its oldest memories? It is the miraculous moment of intense emotion in which whether we are duped or transfigured we are in touch with a reality firmer than the reality of this world. The Faery Castle is the counterpart and the example of those glimpses which every man has enjoyed, especially in youth, and which no man even in the dust of middle age can quite forget. In these were found a complete harmony and satisfaction which were not negative nor dependent upon the absence of discord—such completion as criticism may conceive—but as positive as colour or as music, and clothed as it were in a living body of joy.

The vision may be unreal or real, in either case it is valid: if it is unreal it is a symbol of the world behind the world. But it is no less a symbol; even if it is unreal it is a sudden seeing of the place to which our faces are set during this unbroken marching of years.

Once on the Sacramento River a little before sunrise I looked eastward from a boat and saw along the dawn the black edge of the Sierras. The peaks were as sharp as are the Malvern from the Cotswold, though they were days and days away. They made a broad jagged band intensely black against the glow of the sky. I drew them so. A tiny corner of the sun appeared between two central peaks:—at once the whole range was suffused with glory. The sun was wholly risen and the mountains had completely disappeared,—in the place where they had been was the sky of the horizon.

At another time, also in a boat, I saw beyond a spit of the Tunisian coast, as it seemed a flat island. Through the heat, with which the air trembled, was a low gleam of sand, a palm or two, and, less certainly, the flats and domes of a white native village. Our course, which was to round the point, went straight for this island, and, as we approached, it became first doubtful, then flickering, then a play of light upon the waves. It was a mirage, and it had melted into the air.

* * * * *

There is a part of us, as all the world knows, which is immixed with change and by change only can live. There is another part which lies behind motion and time, and that part is ourselves. This diviner part has surely a stronghold which is also an inheritance. It has a home which perhaps it remembers and which certainly it conceives at rare moments during our path over the moor.

This is that Faery Castle. It is revealed at the sound of a trumpet; we turn our eyes, we glance and we perceive it; we strain to reach it—in the very effort of our going the doom of human labour falls upon us and it vanishes away.

It is real or unreal. It is unreal like that island which I thought to see some miles from Africa, but which was not truly there: for the ship when it came to the place that island had occupied sailed easily over an empty sea. It is real, like those high Sierras which I drew from the Sacramento River at the turn of the night and which were suddenly obliterated by the rising sun.

Where the vision is but mirage, even there it is a symbol of our goal; where it stands fast and true, for however brief a moment, it can illumine, and should determine the whole of our lives. For such sights are the manifestation of that glory which lies permanent beyond the changing of the world. Of such a sort are the young passionate intentions to relieve the burden of mankind, first love, the mood created by certain strains of music, and—as I am willing to believe—the Walls of Heaven.



ON A SOUTHERN HARBOUR

The ship had sailed northward in an even manner and under a sky that was full of stars, when the dawn broke and the full day quickly broadened over the Mediterranean. With the advent of the light the salt of the sea seemed stronger, and there certainly arose a new freshness in the following air; but as yet no land appeared. Until at last, seated as I was alone in the fore part of the vessel, I clearly saw a small unchanging shape far off before me, peaked upon the horizon and grey like a cloud. This I watched, wondering what its name might be, who lived upon it, or what its fame was; for it was certainly land.

I watched in this manner for some hours—perhaps for two—when the island, now grown higher, was so near that I could see trees upon it; but they were set sparsely, as trees are on a dry land, and most of them seemed to be thorn trees.

It was at this moment that a man who had been singing to himself in a low tone aft came up to me and told me that this island was called the Island of Goats and that there were no men upon it to his knowledge, that it was a lonely place and worth little. But by this time there had risen beyond the Island of Goats another and much larger land.

It lay all along the north in a mountainous belt of blue, and any man coming to it for the first time or unacquainted with maps would have said to himself: "I have found a considerable place." And, indeed, the name of the island indicates this, for it is called Majorca, "The Larger Land." Towards this, past the Island of Goats, and past the Strait, we continued to sail with a light breeze for hours, until at last we could see on this shore also sparse trees; but most of them were olive trees, and they were relieved with the green of cultivation up the high mountain sides and with the white houses of men.

The deck was now crowded with people, most of whom were coming back to their own country after an exile in Africa among un-Christian and dangerous things. The little children who had not yet known Europe, having been born beyond the sea, were full of wonder; but their parents, who knew the shortness of human life and its trouble, were happy because they had come back at last and saw before them the known jetties and the familiar hills of home. As I was surrounded by so much happiness, I myself felt as though I had come to the end of a long journey and was reaching my own place, though I was, in reality, bound for Barcelona, and after that up northward through the Cerdagne, and after that to Perigord, and after that to the Channel, and so to Sussex, where all journeys end.

The harbour had about it that Mediterranean-go-as-you-please which everywhere in the Mediterranean distinguishes harbours. It was as though the men of that sea had said: "It never blows for long: let us build ourselves a rough refuge and to-morrow sail away." We neared this harbour, but we flew no flag and made no signal. Beneath us the water was so clear that all one need have done to have brought the vessel in if one had not known the channel would have been to lean over the side and to keep the boy at the helm off the very evident shallows and the crusted rocks by gestures of one's hands, for the fairway was like a trench, deep and blue. So we slid into Palma haven, and as we rounded the pier the light wind took us first abeam and then forward; then we let go and she swung up and was still. They lowered the sails.

The people who were returning were so full of activity and joy that it was like a hive of bees; but I no longer felt this as I had felt their earlier and more subdued emotion, for the place was no longer distant or mysterious as it had been when first its sons and daughters had come up on deck to welcome it and had given me part of their delight. It was now an evident and noisy town; hot, violent, and strong. The houses had about them a certain splendour, the citizens upon the quays a satisfied and prosperous look. Its streets, where they ran down towards the sea, were charmingly clean and cared for, and the architecture of its wealthier mansions seemed to me at once unusual and beautiful, for I had not yet seen Spain. Each house, so far as I could make out from the water, was entered by a fine sculptured porch which gave into a cool courtyard with arcades under it, and most of the larger houses had escutcheons carved in stone upon their walls.

But what most pleased me and also seemed most strange was to see against the East a vast cathedral quite Northern in outline, except for a severity and discipline of which the North is incapable save when it has steeped itself in the terseness of the classics.

This monument was far larger than anything in the town. It stood out separate from the town and dominated it upon its seaward side, somewhat as might an isolated hill, a shore fortress of rock. It was almost bare of ornament; its stones were very carefully worked and closely fitted, and little waves broke ceaselessly along the base of its rampart. Landwards, a mass of low houses which seemed to touch the body of the building did but emphasise its height. When I had landed I made at once for this cathedral, and with every step it grew greater.

We who are of the North are accustomed to the enormous; we have unearthly sunsets and the clouds magnify our hills. The Southern men see nothing but misproportion in what is enormous. They love to have things in order, and violence in art is odious to them. This high and dreadful roof had not been raised under the influences of the island; it had surely been designed just after the re-conquest from the Mohammedans, when a turbulent army, not only of Gascons and Catalans, but of Normans also and of Frisians, and of Rhenish men, had poured across the water and had stormed the sea-walls. On this account the cathedral had about it in its sky-line and in its immensity, and in the Gothic point of its windows, a Northern air. But in its austerity and in its magnificence it was Spaniard.

As I passed the little porch of entry in the side wall I saw a man. He was standing silent and alone; he was not blind and perhaps not poor, and as I passed he begged the charity not of money but of prayers. When I had entered the cool and darkness of the nave, his figure still remained in my mind, and I could not forget it. I remembered the straw hat upon his head and the suit of blue canvas which he wore, and the rough staff of wood in his hand. I was especially haunted by his expression, which was patient and masqued as though he were enduring a pain and chose to hide it.

The nave was empty. It was a great hollow that echoed and re-echoed; there were no shrines and no lamps, and no men or women praying, and therefore the figure at the door filled my mind more and more, until I went out and asked him if he was in need of money, of which at that moment I had none. He answered that his need was not for money but only for prayers.

"Why," said I, "do you need prayers?"

He said it was because his fate was upon him.

I think he spoke the truth. He was standing erect and with dignity, his eyes were not disturbed, and he repeatedly refused the alms of passers-by.

"No one" said I, "should yield to these moods."

He answered nothing, but looked pensive like a man gazing at a landscape and remembering his life.

But it was now the hour when the ship was to be sailing again, and I could not linger, though I wished very much to talk more with him. I begged him to name a shrine where a gift might be of especial value to him. He said that he was attached to no one shrine more than to any other, and then I went away regretfully, remembering how earnestly he had asked for prayers.

This was in Palma of Majorca not two years ago. There are many such men, but few who speak so humbly.

When I had got aboard again the ship sailed out and rounded a lighthouse point and then made north to Barcelona. The night fell, and next morning there rose before us the winged figures that crown the Custom House of that port and are an introduction to the glories of Spain.



ON A YOUNG MAN AND AN OLDER MAN

A Young Man of my acquaintance having passed his twenty-eighth birthday, and wrongly imagining this date to represent the Grand Climacteric, went by night in some perturbation to an Older Man and spoke to him as follows:

"Sir! I have intruded upon your leisure in order to ask your advice upon certain matters."

The Older Man, whose thoughts were at that moment intently set upon money, looked up in a startled way and attempted to excuse himself, suffering as he did from the delusion that the Young Man was after a loan. But the Young Man, whose mind was miles away from all such trifling things, continued to press him anxiously without so much as noticing that he had perturbed his Senior.

"I have come, Sir," said he, "to ask your opinion, advice, experience, and guidance upon something very serious which has entered into my life, which is, briefly, that I feel myself to be growing old."

Upon hearing this so comforting and so reasonable a statement the Older Man heaved a profound sigh of relief and turning to him a mature and smiling visage (as also turning towards him his person and in so doing turning his Polished American Hickory Wood Office Chair), answered with a peculiar refinement, but not without sadness, "I shall be happy to be of any use I can"; from which order and choice of words the reader might imagine that the Older Man was himself a Colonial, like his chair. In this imagination the reader, should he entertain it, would be deceived.

The Younger Man then proceeded, knotting his forehead and putting into his eyes that troubled look which is proper to virtue and to youth:

"Oh, Sir! I cannot tell you how things seem to be slipping from me! I smell less keenly and taste less keenly, I enjoy less keenly and suffer less keenly than I did. Of many things which I certainly desired I can only say that I now desire them in a more confused manner. Of certain propositions in which I intensely believed I can only say that I now see them interfered with and criticised perpetually, not, as was formerly the case, by my enemies, but by the plain observance of life, and what is worse, I find growing in me a habit of reflection for reflection's sake, leading nowhere—and a sort of sedentary attitude in which I watch but neither judge nor support nor attack any portion of mankind."

The Older Man, hearing this speech, congratulated his visitor upon his terse and accurate methods of expression, detailed to him the careers in which such habits of terminology are valuable, and also those in which they are a fatal fault.

"Having heard you," he said, "it is my advice to you, drawn from a long experience of men, to enter the legal profession, and, having entered it, to supplement your income with writing occasional articles for the more dignified organs of the Press. But if this prospect does not attract you (and, indeed, there are many whom it has repelled) I would offer you as an alternative that you should produce slowly, at about the rate of one in every two years, short books compact of irony, yet having running through them like a twisted thread up and down, emerging, hidden, and re-emerging in the stuff of your writing, a memory of those early certitudes and even of passion for those earlier revelations."

When the Older Man had said this he sat silent for a few moments and then added gravely, "But I must warn you that for such a career you need an accumulated capital of at least L30,000."

The Young Man was not comforted by advice of this sort, and was determined to make a kind of war upon the doctrine which seemed to underlie it. He said in effect that if he could not be restored to the pristine condition which he felt to be slipping from him he would as lief stop living.

On hearing this second statement the Older Man became extremely grave.

"Young Man," said he, "Young Man, consider well what you are saying! The poet Shakespeare in his most remarkable effort, which, I need hardly tell you, is the tragedy of Hamlet, or the Prince of Denmark, has remarked that the thousand doors of death stand open. I may be misquoting the words, and if I am I do so boldly and without fear, for any fool with a book at his elbow can get the words right and yet not understand their meaning. Let me assure you that the doors of death are not so simply hinged, and that any determination to force them involves the destruction of much more than these light though divine memories of which you speak; they involve, indeed, the destruction of the very soul which conceives them. And let me assure you, not upon my own experience, but upon that of those who have drowned themselves imperfectly, who have enlisted in really dangerous wars, or who have fired revolvers at themselves in a twisted fashion with their right hands, that, quite apart from that evil to the soul of which I speak, the evil to the mere body in such experiments is so considerable that a man would rather go to the dentist than experience them.... You will forgive me," he added earnestly, "for speaking in this gay manner upon an important philosophical subject, but long hours of work at the earning of my living force me to some relaxation towards the end of the day, and I cannot restrain a frivolous spirit even in the discussion of such fundamental things.... No, do not, as you put it, 'stop living.' It hurts, and no one has the least conception of whether it is a remedy. What is more, the life in front of you will prove, after a few years, as entertaining as the life which you are rapidly leaving."

The Young Man caught on to this last phrase, and said, "What do you mean by 'entertaining'?"

"I intend," said the Older Man, "to keep my advice to you in the note to which I think such advice should be set. I will not burden it with anything awful, nor weight an imperfect diction with absolute verities in which I do indeed believe, but which would be altogether out of place at this hour of the evening. I will not deny that from eleven till one, and especially if one be delivering an historical, or, better still, a theological lecture, one can without loss of dignity allude to the permanent truth, the permanent beauty, and the permanent security without which human life wreathes up like mist and is at the best futile, at the worst tortured. But you must remember that you have come to me suddenly with a most important question, after dinner, that I have but just completed an essay upon the economic effect of the development of the Manchurian coalfields, and that (what is more important) all this talk began in a certain key, and that to change one's key is among the most difficult of creative actions.... No, Young Man, I shall not venture upon the true reply to your question."

On hearing this answer the Young Man began to curse and to swear and to say that he had looked everywhere for help and had never found it; that he was minded to live his own life and to see what would come of it; that he thought the Older Man knew nothing of what he was talking about, but was wrapping it all up in words; that he had clearly recognised in the Older Man's intolerable prolixity several cliches or ready-made phrases; that he hoped on reaching the Older Man's age he would not have been so utterly winnowed of all substance as to talk so aimlessly; and finally that he prayed God for a personal development more full of justice, of life, and of stuff than that which the Older Man appeared to have suffered or enjoyed.

On hearing these words the Older Man leapt to his feet (which was not an easy thing for him to do) and as one overjoyed grasped the Younger Man by the hand, though the latter very much resented such antics on the part of Age.

"That is it! That is it!" cried the Older Man, looking now far too old for his years. "If I have summoned up in you that spirit I have not done ill! Get you forward in that mood and when you come to my time of life you will be as rotund and hopeful a fellow as I am myself."

But having heard these words the Young Man left him in disgust.

The Older Man, considering all these things as he looked into the fire when he was alone, earnestly desired that he could have told the Young Man the exact truth, have printed it, and have produced a proper Gospel. But considering the mountains of impossibility that lay in the way of such public action, he sighed deeply and took to the more indirect method. He turned to his work and continued to perform his own duty before God and for the help of mankind. This, on that evening, was for him a review upon the interpretation of the word haga in the Domesday Inquest. This kept him up till a quarter past one, and as he had to take a train to Newcastle at eight next morning it is probable that much will be forgiven him when things are cleared.



ON THE DEPARTURE OF A GUEST

C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va. Adieu! la tres gente compagne— Oncques ne suis moins gai pour ca (C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va) Et lon-lon-laire, et lon-lon-la Peut-etre perd's; peut-etre gagne. C'est ma Jeunesse qui s'en va.

(From the Author's MSS. In the library of the Abbey of Theleme.)

Host: Well, Youth, I see you are about to leave me, and since it is in the terms of your service by no means to exceed a certain period in my house, I must make up my mind to bid you farewell.

Youth: Indeed, I would stay if I could; but the matter lies as you know in other hands, and I may not stay.

Host: I trust, dear Youth, that you have found all comfortable while you were my guest, that the air has suited you and the company?

Youth: I thank you, I have never enjoyed a visit more; you may say that I have been most unusually happy.

Host: Then let me ring for the servant who shall bring down your things.

Youth: I thank you civilly! I have brought them down already—see, they are here. I have but two, one very large bag and this other small one.

Host: Why, you have not locked the small one! See it gapes!

Youth (somewhat embarrassed): My dear Host ... to tell the truth ... I usually put it off till the end of my visits ... but the truth ... to tell the truth, my luggage is of two kinds.

Host: I do not see why that need so greatly confuse you.

Youth (still more embarrassed): But you see—the fact is—I stay with people so long that—well, that very often they forget which things are mine and which belong to the house ... And—well, the truth is that I have to take away with me a number of things which ... which, in a word, you may possibly have thought your own.

Host (coldly): Oh!

Youth (eagerly): Pray do not think the worse of me—you know how strict are my orders.

Host (sadly): Yes, I know; you will plead that Master of yours, and no doubt you are right.... But tell me, Youth, what are those things?

Youth: They fill this big bag. But I am not so ungracious as you think. See, in this little bag, which I have purposely left open, are a number of things properly mine, yet of which I am allowed to make gifts to those with whom I lingered—you shall choose among them, or if you will, you shall have them all.

Host: Well, first tell me what you have packed in the big bag and mean to take away.

Youth: I will open it and let you see. (He unlocks it and pulls the things out.) I fear they are familiar to you.

Host: Oh! Youth! Youth! Must you take away all of these? Why, you are taking away, as it were, my very self! Here is the love of women, as deep and changeable as an opal; and here is carelessness that looks like a shower of pearls. And here I see—Oh! Youth, for shame!—you are taking away that silken stuff which used to wrap up the whole and which you once told me had no name, but which lent to everything it held plenitude and satisfaction. Without it surely pleasures are not all themselves. Leave me that at least.

Youth: No, I must take it, for it is not yours, though from courtesy I forbore to tell you so till now. These also go: Facility, the ointment; Sleep, the drug; Full Laughter, that tolerated all follies. It was the only musical thing in the house. And I must take—yes, I fear I must take Verse.

HOST: Then there is nothing left!

YOUTH: Oh! yes! See this little open bag which you may choose from! Feel it!

HOST (lifting it): Certainly it is very heavy, but it rattles and is uncertain.

YOUTH: That is because it is made up of divers things having no similarity; and you may take all or leave all, or choose as you will. Here (holding up a clout) is Ambition: Will you have that?...

HOST (doubtfully): I cannot tell.... It has been mine and yet ... without those other things....

YOUTH (cheerfully): Very well, I will leave it. You shall decide on it a few years hence. Then, here is the perfume Pride. Will you have that?

HOST: No; I will have none of it. It is false and corrupt, and only yesterday I was for throwing it out of window to sweeten the air in my room.

YOUTH: So far you have chosen well; now pray choose more.

HOST: I will have this—and this—and this. I will take Health (takes it out of the bag), not that it is of much use to me without those other things, but I have grown used to it. Then I will take this (takes out a plain steel purse and chain), which is the tradition of my family, and which I desire to leave to my son. I must have it cleaned. Then I will take this (pulls out a trinket), which is the Sense of Form and Colour. I am told it is of less value later on, but it is a pleasant ornament ... And so, Youth, goodbye.