Resignation became a virtue of necessity for Sweden (If you do what you must with a good grace, you make a virtue of necessity; without make, a virtue of necessity loses its meaning).

I strongly advise the single working-man who would become a successful backyard poultry-keeper to ignore the advice of Punch, and to secure a useful helpmate.

The beloved lustige Wien [merry Vienna] of his youth had suffered a sea-change. The green glacis ... was blocked by ranges of grand new buildings (Ariel must chuckle at the odd places in which his sea-change turns up).

Many of the celebrities who in that most frivolous of watering-places do congregate.

When about to quote Sir Oliver Lodge’s tribute to the late leader, Mr. Law drew, not a dial, but what was obviously a penny memorandum book from his pocket (You want to mention that Mr. Bonar Law took a notebook out of his pocket.  But pockets are humdrum things.  How give a literary touch?  Call it a poke?  No, we can better that; who was it drew what from his poke?  Why, Touchstone, a dial, to be sure! and there you are).—­H.W.F.

CORRESPONDENCE

We have a constant flow of correspondence, and we are afraid the writers must think us unpractical, incompetent, or neglectful, because we give their inquiries no place in our tracts; they may naturally think that it is our business to pass judgement on any linguistic question that troubles them; but most of these queries would be satisfactorily answered by reference to the O.  E. D., which we do not undertake to reprint; in other cases, where we are urged to protest against the common abuse of some word or phrase, we do not think (as we have before explained) that it is worth while to treat any such detail without full illustration, and this our correspondents do not supply.  We propose now to demonstrate the situation by dealing with a small selection of these abused words, which may serve as examples.

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IMPLICIT

The human mind likes a good clear black-and-white contrast; when two words so definitely promise one of these contrasts as explicit and implicit, and then dash our hopes by figuring in phrases where contrast ceases to be visible—­say in ‘explicit support’ and ’implicit obedience’, with absolute or complete or full as a substitute that might replace either or both—­, we ask with some indignation whether after all black is white, and perhaps decide that implicit is a shifty word with which we will have no further dealings.  It is noteworthy in more than one respect.