superior to its enclosure.  In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and takes care to get it in ``the little verses wot they puts inside the crackers.’’ The special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to epic verse is due to this habit of feeling.  A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne:  the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular —­ because of its eloquence of margin.  Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle.  The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote ``Beowulf,’’ our other English epic, grasped the great fact from the first, so that his work is much the more popular of the two.  The moral is evident.  An authority on practical book-making has stated that ``margin is a matter to be studied’’; also that ``to place the print in the centre of the paper is wrong in principle, and to be deprecated.’’ Now, if it be ``wrong in principle,’’ let us push that principle to its legitimate conclusion, and ``deprecate’’ the placing of print on any part of the paper at all.  Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask —­ when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin?  How we shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!

The Eternal Whither

There was once an old cashier in some ancient City establishment, whose practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike-man at his post, and performing all the duties appertaining thereunto.  This was vulgarly taken to be an instance of mere mill-horse enslavement to his groove —­ the reception of payments; and it was spoken of both in mockery of all mill-horses and for the due admonishment of others.  And yet that clerk had discovered for himself an unique method of seeing Life at its best, the flowing, hurrying, travelling, marketing Life of the Highway; the life of bagman and cart, of tinker, and pig-dealer, and all cheery creatures that drink and chaffer together in the sun.  He belonged, above all, to the scanty class of clear-seeing persons who know both what they are good for and what they really want.  To know what you would like to do is one thing; to go out boldly and do it is another —­ and a rarer; and the sterile fields about Hell-Gate are strewn with the corpses of those who would an if they could.

To be sure, being bent on the relaxation most congenial to one’s soul, it is possible to push one’s disregard for convention too far:  as is seen in the case of another, though of an earlier generation, in the same establishment.  In his office there was the customary ``attendance-book,’’ wherein the clerks were expected to sign each day.  Here his name one morning ceases abruptly from appearing;