Now this requires thinking over, because it is so subtle. The "muddy-white, dunghill sort of thing" is really a new expression—quite new—and beautiful. It suggests so much! But you must come to the humour—you must remember there was a shirt mentioned, and that the hero was "begging the guard to look at the name on the tail of it." I went off into positive convulsions of mirth when I first read that passage. Falstaff's coarse witticisms seemed unbearable after it. "To look at the name on the tail of it!" It is simply inimitable. There is a jovial sound in the very swing of the sentence. And Private Mulvaney! What a creation! Just listen to him—
"I'm a born scutt av the barrick-room! The Army's mate and dhrink to me, bekase I'm wan av the few that can't quit ut. I've put in sivinteen years an' the pipeclay's in the marrow av me. Av I wud have kept out av wan big dhrink a month, I wud have been a Hon'ry Lift'nint by this time—a nuisince to my betthers, a laughin' stock to my equils an' a curse to meself. Bein 'fwhat I am, I'm Privit Mulvaney wid no good-conduc' pay an' a devourin' thirst. Always barrin' me little frind Bob Bahadur, I know as much about the Army as most men."
No wonder, after this, that the ever-watchful purveyors of "Literary Gossip" rouse themselves up from lachrymose tenderness to positive passion in re this marvellous Rudyard, and speak of him as "the stronger Dickens going forth conquering and to conquer."
The phrase, "the stronger Dickens," is coming it very strong indeed, but—it's only the paragraph-men. These chroniclers of the time have pathetically informed us how on one occasion Kip ran away from the "clamour" (of the paragraph-men) to India to fetch his papa, and how his papa came back with him, to look after him, I suppose, and protect him from all the naughty, vicious people who wanted to blow his skin out into the size of a bull when Nature meant him to keep to the strict proportions of the other figure in the fable. Good Rudyard! Already the bloom is off the rye, just slightly, for if we are to believe the Athenæum, an Eden Phillpotts is "the new Kipling." "O Eden Phillpotts! Phoebus! What a name! To fill the speaking-trump of future Fame!" The "loose ungrammatical" Byron's lines fit Phillpotts as excellent well as Kipling. Phillpotts is really a fine name in every way—splendidly hideous, and available for all sorts of Savile Club and Saturday Review witticisms, such as—
"Phill the Pott and fill the can
Eden is our Coming Man!"
Or this, sung slowly with religious nasal intonation to the well-known hymeneal melody—
"The voice that breathed o'er Eden,
From Athenæum bowers,
Said 'Phillpotts' stories must be praised,