Again, ought I not to call on the WHITTLESEAS?  Mr. and Mrs. WHITTLESEA have simply overflowed with kindness towards me.  I never enjoyed anything more than the week I spent at their house in Kent a short time ago.  They are now in town, and, what is more, they know that I am in town too.  Of course I ought to call.  It’s my plain duty, and that is, as far as I can tell, the only reason which absolutely prevents me from calling upon that hospitable family.  Why need I go through the long list of my pressing duties?  I ought to write my article on “Modern Theosophy:  A Psychological Parallel,” for the next number of The Brain.  I ought to visit my dentist; I ought to have my hair cut.  But I shall do none of these things.  On the other hand, it is absolutely unnecessary that I should write to you.  No evil would befall me if I waited another year, or even omitted altogether to write to you.  And that is the precise reason why I am now addressing you.  As a matter of fact, I like you.  As I have already said, the performance of strict duties is irksome to me.  It is you, my dear laziness, who forbid me to perform them, and thus save me from many an uncongenial task.  That is why I like you.

And, after all, the common abuse of you is absurd.  I have heard grave and industrious persons declare emphatically that any one who allows himself to fall under your sway debars himself utterly from every chance of success.  Fiddlesticks!  I snap my fingers at such folly.  What do these gentlemen say to the case of FIGTREE, the great Q.C.?  Everybody knows that FIGTREE is, without exception, the most indolent man in the world.  Let any doubter walk down Middle Temple Lane and ask the first young barrister he meets what he thinks of FIGTREE.  I am ready to wager my annual income that the reply will be, “What, Old FIGTREE!  Why, he’s the laziest man at the Bar.  I thought everybody knew that.”  I may be told, of course, that FIGTREE appears in all the big cases—­that his management of them is extraordinarily successful; that the Judges defer to him; that his speech in the Camberwell poisoning case lasted a day and a half, and is acknowledged to be a masterpiece of forensic eloquence, fit to rank with the best efforts of Erskine; that his fees always exceed ten thousand pounds a year and that his book on Fines and Recoveries is a monument of industry.  All this I shall hear from some member of the outside public, who does not know his FIGTREE.  But the fact remains.  FIGTREE is the most indolent being alive.  I doubt if he can be induced to read a brief before he goes into Court.  Many are the tales told by those who have been his juniors of the marvellous skill and address with which FIGTREE has time after time extricated himself from awkward situations into which he had been led by his ignorance of the details of the case in which he happened to be engaged.  In the sensational libel case of Bagwell v. Muter, FIGTREE,