It is this prevailing gloom, I think, which accounts for the enormous and increasing popularity of fiction.  Observe how story-telling creeps into the very newspapers (along with their professional fibbing); and, even in the magazines, how it lies down side by side with ‘burning questions,’ like the weaned child putting its hand into the cockatrice’s den.  For your sake, my good fellow, who write stories [here my friend glowered at me compassionately], I am glad of it; but the fact is of melancholy significance.  It means that people are glad to find themselves ‘anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,’ and (I must be allowed to add) they are generally gratified, for anything less like real life than what some novelists portray it is difficult to imagine.

[Here he stared at me so exceedingly hard, that anyone with a less heavenly temper, or who had no material reasons for putting up with it, would have taken his remark as personal, and gone away.]

Another cause of the absence of good fellowship amongst us (he went on) is the growth of education.  It sticks like a fungus to everybody, and though, it is fair to say, mostly outside, does a great deal of mischief.  The scholastic interest has become so powerful that nobody dares speak a word against it; but the fact is, men are educated far beyond their wits.  You can’t fill any cup beyond what it will hold, and the little cups are exceedingly numerous.  Boys are now crammed (with information) like turkeys (but unfortunately not killed at Christmas), and when they grow up there is absolutely no room in them for a joke.  The prigs that frequent my Midway Inn are as the sands in its hour-glass, only with no chance, alas! of their running out.  The wisdom of our ancestors limited education, and very wisely, to the three R’s; that is all that is necessary for the great mass of mankind:  whereas the pick of them, with those clamping irons well stuck to their heels, will win their way to the topmost peaks of knowledge.

At the very best—­that is to say when it produces anything—­what does the most costly education in this country produce in ordinary minds but the deplorable habit of classical quotation?  If it could teach them to think—­but that is a subject, my dear friend, into which you will scarcly follow me.

[I could have knocked his head off if he had not been so exceptionally stout and strong, and as it was, I took up my hat to go, when a thought struck me.]

’Among your valuable remarks upon the ideas entertained by society at present, you have said nothing, my dear sir, about the ladies.’

‘I never speak of anything,’ he replied with dignity, ’which I do not thoroughly understand.  Man I do know—­down to his boots; but woman’—­here he sighed and hesitated—­’no; I don’t know nearly so much of her.’

THE CRITIC ON THE HEARTH.