The epigrammatist still lingers, and sometimes dines; but his roses have faded, and the weariness of his audience is no longer a pose.  A tragic ghost, he feels like one who treads alone some banquet-hall, not, indeed, deserted, but filled with another company, and that is so much drearier.  The faces that used to smile on him are gone, the present faces only stare and if he told them now that it may be better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but both are good, they would conceal a shiver of boredom under politeness.  It is recognised that life with an epigrammatist has become unendurable.  “Witty?” (if one may quote again the Carlyle whom English people are forgetting) “O be not witty:  none of us is bound to be witty under penalties.  A fashionable wit?  If you ask me which, he or a death’s head, will be the cheerier company for me, pray send not him.”

Evidently there are some creatures too bright if not too good for human nature’s daily food.  They are like the pudding that was all raisins, because the cook had forgotten to put in the suet.  Sensible people put in the suet pretty thick, and they find it fortifying.  Here in England, for instance, it has been the standing sneer of upstart pertness that ordinary men and women always set out upon their conversations with the weather.  Well, and why on earth should they not?  In every part of the world the weather is the most important subject.  India may suffer from unrest, but the Indian’s first thought is whether she suffers from drought.  Russia may seethe with revolution, but ninety-nine per cent. of Russians are thinking of the crops.  France may be disturbed about Germany, but Frenchmen know the sun promises such a vintage as never was.  War may threaten Russia, but the outbreak depends upon the harvest.  Certainly, in our barren wildernesses of city it does not much matter whether it rains or shines, except to the top hats and long skirts of the inhabitants.  But mankind cannot live on smuts and sulphur, and our discussions on the weather keep us in touch with the kindly fruits of the earth; we show we are not weaned from Nature, but still remember the cornfields and orchards by which we live.  Every cloud and wind, every ray of sunshine comes filled with unconscious memories, and secret influences extend to our very souls with every change in weather.  Like fishes, we do not bite when the east wind blows; like ducks and eels, we sicken or go mad in thunder.

Why should we fuddle our conversation with paradoxes and intellectual interests when nature presents us with this sempiternal theme?  Ruskin observed that Pusey never seemed to know what sort of a day it was.  That showed a mind too absent from terrestrial things, too much occupied with immortality.  Here in England the variety of the weather affords a special incitement to discussion.  It is like a fellow-creature or a race-meeting; the sporting element is added, and you never know what a single day may bring forth.