His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of.  He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep.  All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage.  The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase—­he will be always “taken in.”  To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything.  It is the hospitality of circumstance.  With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life.  And the sceptic is cast out by it.—­“Charles Dickens.”

[Sidenote:  G.K.  Chesterton]

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages.  Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions, with comfort and strength in them.  Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water—­an excellent thing if you can get it.  Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water—­which is a fuss about nothing.  Mr. Bernard Shaw’s philosophy is exactly like black coffee—­it awakens, but it does not really inspire.  Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one’s contempt for it in stronger terms than that.—­“William Blake.”

* * * * *

To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street.  Upon any one who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime.  Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realises one of our visions.—­“The Defendant.”

“THE VULGAR TONGUE” [Sidenote:  Dean Hole]

First, of abuses.  I protest against those sensational adjectives, which are so commonly misapplied—­against the union of grand and noble words with subjects of a minute and trivial nature.  It is as though a huge locomotive engine were brought out to draw a child’s perambulator, or as though an Armstrong gun were loaded and levelled to exterminate a tom-tit.

I heard a tourist say the other day that, when he was at Black Gang Chine, in the Isle of Wight, he had seen the most magnificent—­what do you think?  A sunset, a man-of-war, a thunderstorm?  Nothing of the kind.  He had seen the most magnificent prawns he ever ate in his life.

And when I asked another young gentleman, who was speaking of “the most tremendous screw ever made in the world,” to which of our great ironclads he referred, he smiled upon me with a benign and courteous pity, as he said that he “was alluding to a screw into the middle pocket, which he had recently seen during a game at billiards between Cook and the younger Roberts.”