There is another way of flattering important people which has become very common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere.  It consists in applying to them the phrases “simple,” or “quiet,” or “modest,” without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whom they are applied.  To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing.  I am not so sure about being quiet.  I am rather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal of noise.  It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a great deal of noise.  But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare and royal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about.  Few human beings, and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old soldier does by long wars become simple.  These virtues are not things to fling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have desired to see these things and have not seen them.  But in the description of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they are used incessantly and quite without thought.  If a journalist has to describe a great politician or financier (the things are substantially the same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always says, “Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white waistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple flower in his button-hole.”  As if any one would expect him to have a crimson frock coat or spangled trousers.  As if any one would expect him to have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole.

But this process, which is absurd enough when applied to the ordinary and external lives of worldly people, becomes perfectly intolerable when it is applied, as it always is applied, to the one episode which is serious even in the lives of politicians.  I mean their death.  When we have been sufficiently bored with the account of the simple costume of the millionaire, which is generally about as complicated as any that he could assume without being simply thought mad; when we have been told about the modest home of the millionaire, a home which is generally much too immodest to be called a home at all; when we have followed him through all these unmeaning eulogies, we are always asked last of all to admire his quiet funeral.  I do not know what else people think a funeral should be except quiet.  Yet again and again, over the grave of every one of those sad rich men, for whom one should surely feel, first and last, a speechless pity—­over the grave of Beit, over the grave of Whiteley—­this sickening nonsense about modesty and simplicity has been poured out.  I well remember that when Beit was buried, the papers said that the mourning-coaches contained everybody of importance, that the floral tributes were sumptuous, splendid, intoxicating; but, for all that, it was a simple and quiet funeral.  What, in the name