Here again is a string, a concatenation—­say, rather, a tiara—­of gems of purest ray serene from the dark unfathomed caves of a Scottish newspaper:—­

The Chinese viewpoint, as indicated in this letter, may not be without interest to your readers, because it evidently is suggestive of more than an academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate in disaster resembling the Chang-Sha riots.  It also ventures to illustrate incidents having their inception in recent premature endeavours to accelerate the development of Protestant missions in China; but we would hope for the sake of the interests involved that what my correspondent describes as ‘the irresponsible ruffian element’ may be known by their various religious designations only within very restricted areas.

Well, the Chinese have given it up, poor fellows! and are asking the Christians—­as to-day’s newspapers inform us—­to pray for them.  Do you wonder?  But that is, or was, the Chinese ’viewpoint,’—­and what a willow-pattern viewpoint!  Observe its delicacy.  It does not venture to interest or be interesting; merely ‘to be not without interest.’  But it does ’venture to illustrate incidents’—­which, for a viewpoint, is brave enough:  and this illustration ’is suggestive of something more than an academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate.’  What materialises?  The unpleasant aspect? or the things?  Grammar says the ‘things,’ ’things which if allowed to materialise.’  But things are materialised already, and as a condition of their being things.  It must be the aspect, then, that materialises.  But, if so, it is also the aspect that culminates, and an aspect, however unpleasant, can hardly do that, or at worst cannot culminate in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots....  I give it up.

Let us turn to another trick of Jargon:  the trick of Elegant Variation, so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attend these lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:—­

     Hayward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had
     no terrors for the Surrey crack.  The old Oxonian, however,
     took some time in settling to work....

Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it.  But why do you practise it in your Essays?  An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron.  In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times.  I expect, nay exact, that Bryon shall be mentioned again and again.  But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate.  So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into ‘that great but unequal poet’ and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self.  Half-way down the page he becomes ‘the