The ink should be glossy black as it leaves your pen, for polished English.  Violet inks lead to sham sentiment, and blue-black to vulgarity.  Red ink essays are often good, but usually unfit for publication.

This is as much almost as anyone need know to begin essay writing.  Given your proper pen and ink, or pencil and paper, you simply sit down and write the thing.  The value of an essay is not its matter, but its mood.  You must be comfortable, of course; an easy-chair with arm-rests, slippers, and a book to write upon are usually employed, and you must be fed recently, and your body clothed with ease rather than grandeur.  For the rest, do not trouble to stick to your subject, or any subject; and take no thought for the editor or the reader, for your essay should be as spontaneous as the lilies of the field.

So long as you do not begin with a definition you may begin anyhow.  An abrupt beginning is much admired, after the fashion of the clown’s entry through the chemist’s window.  Then whack at your reader at once, hit him over the head with the sausages, brisk him up with the poker, bundle him into the wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before he knows where you are.  You can do what you like with a reader then, if you only keep him nicely on the move.  So long as you are happy your reader will be so too.  But one law must be observed:  an essay, like a dog that wishes to please, must have a lively tail, short but as waggish as possible.  Like a rocket, an essay goes only with fizzle and sparks at the end of it.  And, know, that to stop writing is the secret of writing an essay; the essay that the public loves dies young.

THE PARKES MUSEUM

THE PLACE TO SPEND A HAPPY DAY

By way of jest, my morning daily paper constantly includes in its menu of “To-day” the Parkes Museum, Margaret Street, adding, seductively, “free”; and no doubt many a festive Jonas Chuzzlewit has preened himself for a sight-seeing, and all unaware of the multitudes of Margaret Streets—­surely only Charlottes of that ilk are more abundant—­has started forth, he and his feminine, to find this Parkes Museum.  One may even conceive a rare Bank Holiday thoughtfully put aside for the quest, and spent all vainly in the asking of policemen, and in traversing this vast and tiresome metropolis, from Margaret Street to Margaret Street, the freshness of the morning passing into the dry heat of the day, fatigue spreading from the feet upwards, discussion, difference, denial, “words,” and a day of recreation dying at last into a sunset of lurid sulks.  Such possibility was too painful to think of, and a philanthropic inquirer has at last by persistent investigation won the secret of the Missing Museum and opened the way to it for all future investigators.