The upshot of it all is that the Devil turns out to have been Christ who has a dual life and appears sometimes as Christ and sometimes as the Devil. [235]
XVI
Written Sketches
Literary Sketch-Books
The true writer will stop everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes, as the true painter will stop everywhere and anywhere to sketch.
I do not see why an author should not have a sale of literary sketches, each one short, slight and capable of being framed and glazed in small compass. They would make excellent library decorations and ought to fetch as much as an artist’s sketches. They might be cut up in suitable lots, if the fashion were once set, and many a man might be making provision for his family at odd times with his notes as an artist does with his sketches.
London
If I were asked what part of London I was most identified with after Clifford’s Inn itself, I should say Fetter Lane—every part of it. Just by the Record Office is one of the places where I am especially prone to get ideas; so also is the other end, about the butcher’s shop near Holborn. The reason in both cases is the same, namely, that I have about had time to settle down to reflection after leaving, on the one hand, my rooms in Clifford’s Inn and, on the other, Jones’s rooms in Barnard’s Inn where I usually spend the evening. The subject which has occupied my mind during the day being approached anew after an interval and a shake, some fresh idea in connection with it often strikes me. But long before I knew Jones, Fetter Lane was always a street which I was more in than perhaps any other in London. Leather Lane, the road through Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Museum, the Embankment, Fleet Street, the Strand and Charing Cross come next.
A Clifford’s Inn Euphemism
People when they want to get rid of their cats, and do not like killing them, bring them to the garden of Clifford’s Inn, drop them there and go away. In spite of all that is said about cats being able to find their way so wonderfully, they seldom do find it, and once in Clifford’s Inn the cat generally remains there. The technical word among the laundresses in the inn for this is, “losing” a cat:
“Poor thing, poor thing,” said one old woman to me a few days ago, “it’s got no fur on its head at all, and no doubt that’s why the people she lived with lost her.”