- (1) Necessity knows no law, and therefore has to learn.
- (2) Everything comes to the man who is waited upon.
- (3) The later the bird the better for the worm.
- (4) It is never too late to—dine.
There you have the whole secret. Be fearfully cynical, dreadfully bold, delightfully wicked, and carefully unconventional; let paradox and epigram flow in copious streams from your pen. Throw in a few aristocrats with a plentiful flavouring of vices novelistically associated with wicked Baronets. Add an occasional smoking-room—(Mem. "Everything ends in smoke, my dear boy, except the cigars of our host." Use this when host is a parvenu unacquainted with the mysteries of brands)—shred into the mixture a wronged woman, a dull wife, and, if possible, one well tried and tested "situation," then set the whole to simmer for three hours at the Haymarket. The result will be—— But to predict a result is to prophesy, and to prophesy is to know. (N.B.—Work up this rough material. It will come right, and sound well when polished up.)
BY GEORGE!
A Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph suggests that, as the Scotch keep up St. Andrew's Day, and the Irish St. Patrick's, the English should also have a national fête on St. George's Day, the 23rd of April. Why not have the 23rd as St. George's Day, and the 24th as the Dragon's Day? We ought to "Remember the Dragon"—say, by depositing wreaths before the Temple Bar specimen. A Dragon's Day would be a most useful National Institution. The object would not be to exalt the beast, but to celebrate our own (and George's) triumph over it. Everybody has his own private Dragon, and some people have public ones as well. For example, Sir Wilfred Lawson, in laying down his wreath, would be commemorating the introduction of the Veto Bill; Mr. Gladstone would be slaying (in spirit) the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, who is evidently the "Dragon of the Prime (Minister)" referred to by Tennyson; Lord Cranborne would be Mr. Davitt's Dragon, and so on. The fun would be that nobody would be expected to say what Dragon he meant. If a law were passed establishing such a festivity, perhaps it would be denounced as "too Dragonic"!
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
Going to the Booking-Office.
Poet William Watson's Excursions in Criticism are cheap Excursions. He himself describes them as "Prose Recreations of a Rhymer." "Prosy" would have been the truer epithet. The meeting of an Interviewer with Dr. Johnson is the best, and it is also the last. Poet Watson's criticism of Tess of the D'Urbevilles, his Essay on Ibsen's Plays, and another on George Meredith, may have been recreations to the writer, but, like most of the other papers in this volume, they will never be so considered by the lightheaded and unbiassed reader. What is recreation to William Watson is boredom to the Baron, and, as the latter is inclined to think, to the majority of such of the public as may attempt the perusal of W. W.'s recreations. Let W. W. make no more cheap excursions in criticism,—excepting, of course, for his own private amusement, with which no one has a right to interfere,—but let him "thank the gods he is poetical," and so let him remain. His second best Essay, is on The Punishment of Genius, in which he advocates the post-mortem destruction of every scrap of composition, which its author had never intended for the public eye.