gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.  I have found that every man is disposed to call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence.  I have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings despise the world—­that a counsel for the defence would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and Man was rejected of men.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar.  The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically—­it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.

In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature.  They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it.  Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride.  A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes.  The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.

To-day, however, we have reversed this principle.  We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them.  We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again.  There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys’ literature of the lowest stratum.  This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist.  It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.  But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories.  The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.  Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac.  In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage