of Acheron, did they expect it to be?  Did they think there would be human sacrifice—­the immolation of Oriental slaves upon the tomb?  Did they think that long rows of Oriental dancing-girls would sway hither and thither in an ecstasy of lament?  Did they look for the funeral games of Patroclus?  I fear they had no such splendid and pagan meaning.  I fear they were only using the words “quiet” and “modest” as words to fill up a page—­a mere piece of the automatic hypocrisy which does become too common among those who have to write rapidly and often.  The word “modest” will soon become like the word “honourable,” which is said to be employed by the Japanese before any word that occurs in a polite sentence, as “Put honourable umbrella in honourable umbrella-stand;” or “condescend to clean honourable boots.”  We shall read in the future that the modest King went out in his modest crown, clad from head to foot in modest gold and attended with his ten thousand modest earls, their swords modestly drawn.  No! if we have to pay for splendour let us praise it as splendour, not as simplicity.  When next I meet a rich man I intend to walk up to him in the street and address him with Oriental hyperbole.  He will probably run away.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In these days we are accused of attacking science because we want it to be scientific.  Surely there is not any undue disrespect to our doctor in saying that he is our doctor, not our priest, or our wife, or ourself.  It is not the business of the doctor to say that we must go to a watering-place; it is his affair to say that certain results of health will follow if we do go to a watering-place.  After that, obviously, it is for us to judge.  Physical science is like simple addition:  it is either infallible or it is false.  To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value.  I want my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me.  It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.  I apologise for stating all these truisms.  But the truth is, that I have just been reading a thick pamphlet written by a mass of highly intelligent men who seem never to have heard of any of these truisms in their lives.

Those who detest the harmless writer of this column are generally reduced (in their final ecstasy of anger) to calling him “brilliant;” which has long ago in our journalism become a mere expression of contempt.  But I am afraid that even this disdainful phrase does me too much honour.  I am more and more convinced that I suffer, not from a shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon imbecility.  I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that everybody else in the modern world must be very clever.  I have just been reading this important compilation, sent to me