stages of dessert.  I am conscious of patting him on the head and predicting for him a distinguished future.  A very bright little fellow, with his father’s eyes!  Or again, I am down at Newstead.  Byron is in his wildest spirits, a shade too uproarious.  I am glad to escape into the park and stroll a quiet hour on the arm of Mr. Hughes Ball.  Years pass.  The approach of Christmas finds one loth to leave one’s usual haunts.  One is on one’s way to one’s club to dine with Postumus and dear old “Wigsby” Pendennis, quietly at one’s consecrated table near the fireplace.  As one is crossing St. James’s Street an ear-piercing grunt causes one to reel back just in time to be not run over by a motor-car.  Inside is a woman who scowls down at one through the window—­“Serve you right if we’d gone over you.”  Yes, I often have these awakenings to fact—­or rather these provisions of what life might be if I survived into the twentieth century.  Alas!

I have mentioned that woman in the motor-car because she is germane to my theme.  She typifies the vices of the modern Christmas.  For her, by the absurd accident of her wealth, there is no distinction between people who have not motor-cars and people who might as well be run over.  But I wrong her.  If we others were all run over, there would be no one before whom she could flaunt her loathsome air of superiority.  And what would she do then, poor thing?  I doubt she would die of boredom—­painfully, one hopes.  In the same way, if the shop-keepers in Bond Street knew there was no one who could not afford to buy the things in their windows, there would be an end to the display that makes those windows intolerable (to you and me) during the month of December.  I had often suspected that the things there were not meant to be bought by people who could buy them, but merely to irritate the rest.  This afternoon I was sure of it.  Not in one window anything a sane person would give to any one not an idiot, but everywhere a general glossy grin out at people who are not plutocrats.  This sort of thing lashes me to ungovernable fury.  The lion is roused, and I recognise in myself a born leader of men.  Be so good as to smash those windows for me.

One does not like to think that Christmas has been snapped up, docked of its old-world kindliness, and pressed into the service of an odious ostentation.  But so it has.  Alas!  The thought of Father Christmas trudging through the snow to the homes of gentle and simple alike (forgive that stupid, snobbish phrase) was agreeable.  But Father Christmas in red plush breeches, lounging on the doorstep of Sir Gorgius Midas—­one averts one’s eyes.