The violet, again, is a greatly overrated exemplar.  It stimulates a certain bashfulness, hangs its head, and passed as modest among our simple grandparents.  Its special merit is its perfume, and it pretends to wish to hide that from every eye.  But, withal, the fragrance is as far-reaching as any I know.  It droops ingenuously.  “How could you come to me,” it seems to say, “when all these really brilliant flowers invite you?” Mere fishing for compliments.  All the while it is being sweet, to the very best of its undeniable ability.  Then it comes, too, in early spring, without a chaperon, and catches our hearts fresh before they are jaded with the crowded beauties of May.  A really modest flower would wait for the other flowers to come first.  A subtle affectation is surely a different thing from modesty.  The violet is simply artful, the young widow among flowers, and to hold up such a flower as an example is not doing one’s duty by the young.  For true modesty commend me to the agave, which flowers once only in half a hundred years, as one may see for oneself at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Enough has been said to show what scope there is for revision of this sentimental Volapuk.  Mr. Martin himself scarcely goes so far as I have done, though I have merely worked out his suggestion.  His only revolutionary proposal is to displace the wind star by the “rathe primrose” for Forsaken, on the strength of a quotation familiar to every reader of Mason’s little text-book on the English language.  For the rest he followed his authorities, and has followed them now to the remote recesses of the literary lumber-room and into the twopenny book-box.  From that receptacle one copy of him was disinterred only a day or so ago; a hundred and seventy pages of prose, chiefly alliterative, several coloured plates, enthusiastic pencil-marking of a vanished somebody, and, besides, an early Victorian flavour of dust and a dim vision of a silent conversation in a sunlit flower garden—­altogether I think very cheap at twopence.  The fashion has changed altogether now.  In these days we season our love-making with talk about heredity, philanthropy, and sanitation, and present one another with Fabian publications instead of wild flowers.  But in the end, I fancy, the business comes to very much the same thing.

THE LITERARY REGIMEN

At the risk of offending the young beginner’s illusions, he must be reminded of one or two homely but important facts bearing upon literary production.  Homely as they are, they explain much that is at first puzzling.  This perplexing question of distinction; the quality of being somehow fresh—­individual.  Really it is a perfectly simple matter.  It is common knowledge that, after a prolonged fast, the brain works in a feeble manner, the current of one’s thoughts is pallid and shallow, it is difficult to fix the attention and impossible to mobilise the full